A Study of Status of Communication and Information Technology Application at Elementary Smart Schools at Shush City

The aim of the present study was to investigate the status of communication and information technology(ICT) application in the teaching-learning environment of elementary smart schools at Shush City. A mix-method was used in this research. This study was conducted in the boy elementary smart schools of Shush City. In the quantitative section, Due to the small size of the school teaching staff, all teachers participated in the study(N=70). The quantitative data were collected using a researcher- made questionnaire. The validity of questionnaire was confirmed by specialists in education. The reliability was estimated by Cronbach alpha (α=0.94). Also in quantitative section, the descriptive statistics (frequency, percentage, mean and standard deviation) were used and in the inferential statistics the one-sample t test was used to analyze data. In the qualitative section, 10 principals and 10 teachers were interviewed. For analyzing qualitative data, open and axial coding was used. The findings showed that the status of ICT application in the 5 components of (i) use of electronic content (multimedia) by teachers, (ii) designing an electronic content (multimedia), (iii) the role of students in preparation of electronic content (multimedia), (iv) use of ICT to continuing the teaching-learning process(v) encouraging the students to deploy ICT to learn deeply and widely by teachers; was lower than the desirable level. The qualitative results identified important obstacles such as: (a) lack of sufficient knowledge and skills on the part of teachers, students and families (b) cultural, attitudinal and motivational problems related to teachers, families and students, (c) problems related to infrastructure, facilities and financial resources, and (d) the curricular problems.