Web applications of ARNES, Academic and Research Network of Slovenia, are free for Slovenian schools and researchers. For this reason, it was important for us to gain insight to what extent primary school teachers in Slovenia use or at least know them.
Fundamental condition for the carefree use of these is the awareness of the safe use of the web, which we wanted to explore more in detail among the teachers in the second part of the empirical research.
Theoretical part was devoted to a basic presentation of the concepts related to the web and web applications, such as the infrastructure and protocols of the Internet, cloud services and the Internet of Things. The ARNES section is intended to facilitate the understanding of empirical research.
The purpose of the quantitative study was to determine the extent of familiarity of ARNES free online applications by school teachers. The purpose was also to determine whether they are sufficiently aware of the safe use of the internet, which might affect the security of data in the e-markbook and other important school e-documents.
The survey included 63 teachers from various Slovenian elementary schools, who taught in the school year 2017/18 at elementary school. In the sample, we tried to get teachers of different ages, as we wanted to make a comparison between three different age groups of teachers. In the first group we included teachers aged from 21 to 35, the second group consisted of teachers aged 36 to 50, and the last one over the age of 51.
The study is based on a survey questionnaire, the results of which were processed using Microsoft Excel and IBM SPSS Statistics. A survey about the knowledge of ARNES tools has shown that compared to younger groups, the oldest teachers from the sample dominate using ARNES e-mail and ARNES web tools. The youngest teachers mostly use the Oblak 365 (similar to Office 365) and the Filesender. On average, the majority of all age groups of teachers are only familiar with programs, but they are less likely to use them, or they do not even know them. Of the five tools none is used by just a third of teachers.
The analysis of the safe use of the internet among primary school teachers showed that they are quite secure on the web. The vast majority met more than half of the criteria. The biggest weakness has been shown mentioning the name of a child or pet on Facebook, which may lead to leaking one part of the password. They also have trouble dealing with an unknown USB stick that may contain a malicious code. We also found that younger teachers are better informed about online safety.
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