Abstract:

In 2008 the Cisneros Foundation and the AME (Actualización de Maestros en Educación) Program located in Venezuela, designed a five months course for Latin American primary school teachers in order to promote Information and Comunication Technology integration into school teaching practices. The course was delivered for the first time in 2009. There was a second opening in September 2010, reaching a population of 599 teachers from seven Latin American countries.
During the 2010 course implementation the required data for course evaluation was gathered and, as part of the evaluation plan, identical pre and posttest questionnaires were administered to participants. Only 181 of the 599 students that actually attended the course answered both, pretest and posttest.
The tests measured levels of knowledge attained in relation to course objectives and attitudes towards technology in education.
Using the Technology Acceptance Model (Davis, Bagozzi and Warshaw, 1989; Venkatesh and Davis, 2000) as a theoretical framework, attitudes towards technology were described as follows:
• Perceived ease of use: "the degree to which a person believes that using a particular sytem would be free of effort” (Davis, 1989: 319).
• Perceived usefulness of technology: “the degree to which a person believes that using a particular system would enhance his or her job performance" (Davis, 1989: 319).
• Social influence: Measured as subjective norm; that is a "person's perception that most people who are important to him think he should or should not perform the behavior in question" (Fishbein and Ajzen 1975, cited by Venkatesh and Davis, 2000: 187).
• Job Relevance: defined as the “individual's perception regarding the degree to which the target system is applicable to his or her job” (Venkatesh and Davis, 2000: 191).

Preliminary results show that teachers have a positive perception about technology and consider that it is relevant for job performance, useful and moderately easy to learn and to use. They perceive that learning to use technology requires extra-time and effort and think that it is important for their peers and supervisors the fact that they use technology in the school.
Drawing from these results, this paper attempts to document more thoroughly about teacher´s perceptions, attitudes and concepts about technology (De Vries, 2005) by looking into online written communications among participants, and between participants and the facilitators of the course during the 2010 course implementation.
The general purpose is to shed new light about the perceptions, concepts and attitudes that Latin American teachers have towards information and communication technologies in education and the individual, organizational and social factors associated with these perceptions.
Using as a main framework for interpretation the work developed by Venkatesh, Morris, Davis and Davis (2003) and by Carroll (2004). the paper discusses what could be the implications in terms of future use and appropriation of technology

Keywords:

Teacher´s perceptions, primary schools, Latin America, technology acceptance model.