The Adoption and Integration of Web Technologies in K-6 Education

Technology plays an important role in the everyday life of children born in the ‘digital’ era. The ability to use web technologies in the K-6 educational context opens up new opportunities for teaching and learning. This study investigates the adoption and integration of a web technology into a second grade classroom. The study utilizes a community-based research method to assess the technology adoption decision and the skills, knowledge, and resources needed to effectively utilize this digital medium in the classroom and beyond. The study’s context is a collaborative effort between the academic researchers and an elementary school teacher to develop and implement a classroom web site. This project is a pilot to the school-wide implementation of web sites in grades K-6. Our findings suggest that the factors for web site adoption and integration include the alignment of the site’s purpose with the teacher’s needs, the use of rapid application development strategy for web design, the development of a comprehensive teacher’s training program for web content management, and the use of collaborative tactics for web site implementation. Web technologies have a potential to enrich the students’ educational experience and home-to-school communication. However, there are social and technological challenges for planning, designing, and diffusing web technologies into the elementary schools. The findings of this study have implications for the elementary school educators interested in developing and integrating classroom web sites for teaching, learning, and communicating with their community.