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Despite evidence showing technology to having an impact on educational practices and policies and subsequently have the potential to alter traditional definitions of education, the use of the computer in classrooms often remains peripheral and minimal and teachers do not appear to make effective use of technology for teaching (Zhao & Cziko, 2001). In many education systems, the teacher is a key influence to the effective use of technology in the educational system (Zhao, Tan, & Mishra, 2001) and plays a decisive role in determining computer use among their students (Teo, 2006). Hence, it is important to understand the factors that influence teachers’ ability to cope with the pressures presented by the rapid advancements in educational technology and changes in educational policies.
While stakeholders in education expect teachers to engage technology in accordance with the belief that technology has an impact on students’ learning, it must be borne in mind that teachers are affected by many variables that interact with each other that either facilitate or act as barriers to their use of technology. These include personal factors, such as computer self-efficacy (Gong, Xu, & Yu, 2004; Teo, 2008), technical factors, such as technological complexity (Teo, 2009; Thong, Hong, & Tam, 2002), and environmental factor, such as facilitating conditions (Ngai, Poon, & Chan, 2007; Teo, Lee, & Chai, 2008). The fact remains, that fostering technology acceptance among individual teachers is a big challenge for school administrators, technology advocates, and governmental agencies.
User acceptance refers to a willingness to adopt information technology for the tasks it is designed to support. For some long time, developers and procurers of technology could only rely on organizational authority to ensure that technology was used, in the case of many industrial/organizational contexts. However, the changing working practices in recent years among many organizations have enabled greater discretion among technology users. As such there is a need for these organizations to consider the dynamics of user acceptance and how this impacts on technology adoption and usage in their work environments. For this reason, technology acceptance has become an important topic and one of the most researched areas in the information science literature in recent years (Smarkola, 2007).