The paper is an output of the final stage of research project “Information and Communication Technologies in Everyday Work of Teachers” (Czech Science Foundation, Ref. No. 406/06/1022). The central topic of the research was information and communication technologies (ICT) with respect to teachers and their everyday work in primary school. The goal of the project was to explore and describe the ways in which ICT is becoming part of everyday work of teachers as the key agents in formal education. We studied relevant processes, at the level of individual teaching careers on the one hand and at the level of everyday decisions concerning the use of ICT, implementation of this use and its reflection on the other.

The research design combined quantitative and qualitative methods in order to capitalize on the strengths of both. First, within the qualitative part based on video class studies and in-depth interviews with teachers, phenomena observable in the field were explored and subjected to inductive description. Then a quantitative questionnaire survey was used to study the distribution of these phenomena in a broader population of basic school teachers. This particular combination of methods was employed to achieve a high validity of results on the one hand (qualitative stage) and a high reliability on the other (quantitative stage).