Romanian Primary School Teachers and ICT

ICT (Information and Communications Technology) has now gone a long way and has pervaded all domains, education included. We expect teachers to be well qualified to use ICT in their activities, but are they? More exactly, this paper aims to investigate Romanian primary school teachers' ICT needs as well as their practice habits in relation with ICT. Considering the 8 key competences promoted in EU documents, we are interested in finding out the rank Romanian primary school teachers set to the ICT key-competence in their teaching practice. Moreover, we try to establish how frequently Romanian primary school teachers use ICT resources in their teaching practice as compared to other available resources. The quality of a lesson plan obviously influences the successfulness of every class; thus, we focus on Romanian primary school teachers' opinion about the usefulness of the internet in lesson planning. In addition to that, given the overwhelming use of devices in everyday life, ICT could be used to enhance the pedagogical quality of any lesson therefore we look into Romanian primary school teachers' techniques and methods to see whether they use ICT in their class practice. The conclusions of this research reinforce previous investigations: there are important material obstacles, as well as a wide gap between continuous training and practice habits, which leads to ICT underuse by Romanian primary school teachers.