Determination of teachers' technostress levels during the COVID 19 pandemic period

In recent years, there has been a very rapid change and transformation that people have difficulty even making sense of. This rapid change in technology and social life, called Industry 4.0 and society 5.0, has increased even more during the Covid 19 pandemic process we are in. Employees have difficulties in learning and adapting in the face of constantly changing and developing technology. While trying to learn about the changing technology, employees feel inadequate, and they may feel inexperienced and inexperienced in the face of their colleagues, whom they see as competitors, thinking that they are in a knowledge gap. Even this situation can be experienced organizationally. Due to the constant change and development of technology, employees begin to experience great pressure and tension when they strive to re-learn the technologies they use in the organization and keep them up-to-date. This situation causes a kind of stress called technostress in employees. Perhaps the most important of the effects of information technologies on employees; Technostress is defined as an adaptation problem or disease caused by not being able to adapt to new technologies. The education system, which has started to digitalize since the beginning of the 2000s, has had to use more information technologies in the pandemic process. The new technological change has led to great changes in the traditional learning methods that teachers are used to and has made it compulsory to use different technological equipment, software and applications for compulsory distance education. Technology has caused teachers to experience technostress by creating much more stress than before during the pandemic process. Considering that the output of education is students, that is, future generations, it is very important to deal with the effect of technostress, which affects education so much, on teachers in detail, to reveal its causes and consequences, and to offer solutions. In this study, which aims to arouse the interest of school administrators and education specialists in this subject and to contribute to the point of finding a solution by creating awareness about the subject, it has been tried to determine the technostress levels of the teachers and to examine the relationship between the demographic characteristics of the teachers and the technostress levels. In this context, the data obtained from 324 teachers by the survey method were analysed with the package statistics program. As a result of the research, it was concluded that the technostress perceptions of the teachers working in the schools in the city centre of Tunceli were "moderate" during the Covid19 period. When the teachers' gender, marital status, education level, and professional seniority were considered, it was seen that there was no difference in their technostress perceptions. In addition, it has been observed that there are some differences in technostress perceptions when it is considered in terms of teachers' ages, branches and whether they received training on information technologies during the pandemic period. In order to reduce and manage technostress, a number of individual and organizational suggestions were presented and an effort was made to draw the attention of the authorities to the issue and to raise awareness.