|
|
Possibilities and Limits of School Website Usage for Students and Teachers at Primary Schools
NÁDVORNÍK, Václav
This thesis deals with the issue of primary school websites and the potentials of their usage by students and teachers. Recently, websites became very common means of communication and educational platform. The aim of the thesis is to determine the potentials and limits of using websites in primary education. The thesis is divided into three main chapters and it has four appendices. The introductory chapter introduces the aims and the concept of the thesis. The part dedicated to the current state of the problem describes the development of Internet usage by children in the Czech Republic and other countries. This chapter deals with statistic data from the survey carried by the Czech Statistical Office and from a National Educational Institute project Škola21, in which the leaderships of various schools answered questions about the ways of using the school website as a part of self-evaluation. In this chapter, there is also a division of the target groups of school web users, short overview that demonstrates the development of school website in the last ten years, and a description of the parts that it, in some cases, contains. Special part is dedicated to evaluation tools of school website and other resources that can help determine the criteria of a high quality website and thus its potentials and limits. The second chapter, which is the main part of the thesis, is a research of school website and Internet usage in general by students and teachers and presents the basic research questions that were being answered. The main research question that is later divided into sub-questions is "How do students and pedagogical employees use the Internet and school website?" The main tool for collecting the answers were questionnaires designed according to a pre-research. The questionnaires collected the answers about the usage of the school website from students and teachers. The answers are statistically elaborated and the results are being compared by classification of fist and second degree. Here, the ways of students' and teachers' work with the website are compared and relations that can designate the potentials of the school website are looked for. The answers were further compared according to the respondents' school location, frequency of the school website visits, Internet access and other criteria. The results of the research were further discussed in interviews with groups of students and teachers. These interviews were focused on discovering the reasons for the respondents' answers. The thesis summarizes the results of the research and puts them into context with previously published work on this topic. Using these findings, the third chapter defines and explains recommended content of a school website and thus, sets the basic limits and potentials of its usage. On the basis of the information from the overview of current studies on this topic and using the research data, the thesis suggests a school website evaluation tool, which can answer the question about how the potentials of a school website are utilized. Computational algorithms and procedures of creating the evaluation tool are described in the research part of the thesis as well as the results of its testing on two primary schools in the Czech Republic.
|
guest ::
RSS feed.