THE IMPACT OF THE INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY IN LEARNING MATHEMATICS - THE STUDY FOR THE SCHOOLS IN REPUBLIC OF MACEDONIA.

Information and Communications Technology (ICT) has a great importance in all aspects of life, including education as well. With the fast technology progress, implementation of ICT in education is inevitable. There is an old stereotype for mathematics as the most problematic course. Students often tend to use technology in order to find solutions for different mathematical problems without tending to understand them in the reasonable way. This paper investigates the implementation of ICT in education, especially the importance of the use of the ICT in the subject of mathematics. We give its definition, indicators, techniques and methods of implementation, the obstacles that the implementation faces, and some good implementation practices performed in Mathematics. This research covers the teachers from the R. of Macedonia of different ages which come both from elementary and high schools. We analyze the level of ICT usage in mathematics; the different barriers for not using it by the teachers; the ways of communication between the teachers; student arrangement and grouping while using ICT; the importance of using ICT on problem solving, the impact of the ICT in improving the results on the subject of mathematics and comparing it with other subjects. Some of the results found by this research are compared by the results found by the research done by the Institute for Applied Social Science (ITS) with teachers from Germany, Ireland, Spain, Netherlands and Belgium. In order to get a clear illustration concerning the interpretation of the gathered data, making conclusions and decisions, we have used the Statistical Analysis Software SPSS. We have analyzed some elements from the descriptive statistics. For analyzing the obtained data in this research we have used Cross Tabulations. For analyzing the dependencies between variables the chi-square test and the so called t-testing is used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]