Examining the views of teachers and students about the information technologies and software course updated in 2018

The aims of this study were to determine the level of application for the updated Information Technology and Software (ITS) Course, challenges experienced by teachers and students at middle school level, and the solutions created for these challenges. 410 students who are at 5th and 6th grades and take ITS course in the province of Denizli and 32 Information Technology teachers participated in the study. All participants responded to questionnaires and open-ended questions in order to elaborate on their opinions related to the ITS course. In an effort to find out how the course is implemented in a more detailed way, three teachers have been interviewed in order to reflect the process in more detail. The questionnaires focused on understanding teachers' and students' ideas about the ITS course. In addition teachers' gender, years of service, graduation major, class size and number of computers; students' gender, class levels, computer usage period and computer skills were investigated. When the views of the teachers and the students related to ITS course were examined quantitavely, no variable created a significant impact. The qualitative results focused on providing more details about the ITS applications. The results of the qualitative analysis showed that a great majority of the students like audio-visual topics stated as using Internet during the classroom. On the other hand, students did not present big interest in hardware and coding related topics in ITS course. In addition, teachers stated that the implementation of ITS course starts at the middle school level and the course is not implemented at the elementary level. Both the teachers and the students have added that the number of applications should be increased in ITS course. On the other hand, teachers' implementations did not make connections with other subject areas. To increase the effectiveness of the ITS course at elementary and middle school level, it is important to add ITS related applications at the elementary level and connecting ITS course to other subjest areas.