THE INTERNET - A NEW BURNOUT SOURCE FOR THE ROMANIAN TEACHERS? WE ARE DEALING ALREADY WITH A VIRTUAL COMMUNITY FOR TEACHERS

Authors

  • Elena SEGHEDIN Postdoctoral researcher, Romanian Academy, Iasi Branch, POSDRU/89/1.5/S/ ID 56815

Keywords:

Professional Ethics, Teachers Burnout, E-learning, internet, New Technologies

Abstract

Starting from the idea that the New Technologies are more and more present in our daily and professional life, this paper explores issues that have emerged from the using of internet by the Romanian teachers. The research methods were related with the main question we want to answer: Is the Internet another source of the teachers burnout? In the meantime, our objective was to identify which are the dimensions of this burnout emerged from the New Technology use and, an aditional one - to determinate if a good orientation of some Ethical Professional Guidelines could help teachers in prevention of this kind of burnout. We have used the Focus Group (teachers group Interviews) technique applied between April – July 2012 and the online questionnaire applied via email on June, July and August 2012. 390 Respondents have validated some important findings for our specific goals; they are teachers from the Romanian High Schools from six Counties: Braila, Galati, Vaslui, Mures, Botosani, Maramures. While we have been relatively successful in indentifying the dimensions of the teachers burnout we made up some correlation with these results and the findings from the teachers Students reflections on the use of New technologies during their initial teacher training (MA, first semester, 2012-2013 academic year ). From these results, we tried to design some recommandations about designing of a healthy virtual community for romanian teachers under the idea of an Applied Ethics Course for Teachers (with specific topics about using internet like a personal and professional development tool).

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