By Henry Jay Becker. Statistics presented are weighted to constitute a nationally representative sample of teachers. Over the past five years, schools have been rapidly acquiring access to Internet telecommunications. This has been shown through information provided by the National Center for Education Statistics, as well as our own 1998 data on school-level Internet connectivity. Until very recently, though, the type of Internet access that schools had was limited to individual telephone modems connected to single computers, sometimes in a teacher's classroom, but more often in an office or computer lab.
Most teachers report making some use of the Internet in their professional activities.
Teachers who use the Internet in this way typically have either home or classroom access. Of course, it is also likely that teachers who want to use the Internet may go to some effort to acquire either home or classroom access, but it also may be that the presence of the technology increases utilization. Far fewer teachers engage in these types of communications than use Internet as an information-gathering tool to obtain resources for lesson preparation. Also, relatively few teachers have begun posting information, suggestions, opinions, or student work on the World Wide Web. While this is a relatively small percentage of teachers, publishing information on the Web is a substantially new activity, not within the experience of teachers as much as electronic mail or web browsing might be.