Use of Information Communication Technology by School Teachers in Information Provision: An analysis of Sri Lankan perspective

The study examines the use of ICT by school teachers in Sri Lanka and it intends to understand the knowledge of ICT and the use of ICT for their information provision. The survey method was adapted and the questionnaire used as the main data collection tool for the study. The results revealed that the most preferred information source was a colleague followed by personal knowledge or experience ranked second and professional books ranked third with high preference level. With regarding the level of confidence of ICT, the results showed that the highest skill or application in the teachers' responses was utilizing the basics of operating the ICT while managing files was second with high arithmetic mean which implying a higher degree of convergence among teachers at this level. The results further established that there was a positive relationship between use of ICT in teaching and teaching methods by the school teachers. In terms of ICT facilities available in schools, even majority of schools had ICT laboratories, only 11% had well-resourced in terms of infrastructure facilities. With regarding the ways of access to the internet more than half of them accessed from their modems while 18% accessed from private cyber cafes and 15% accessed from their school's ICT laboratories. With regarding the internet search, nearly two third of teachers reported that they had ever searched on the internet for a topic but only 41% mentioned that information retrieved from the internet was either relevant or very relevant to their topics. Majority of teachers used Google as search engine to access the internet while 76.4% had not received any training on ICT. Based on the findings and the conclusion, the recommendations were made.