Abstract

This study identifies the availability and usability of Internet services from twenty private secondary schools in the Benin City. Internet has become a useful tool for education. Thus, access to ICT, the Internet in particular, has provided students with a foundation for meeting their information need, and application of knowledge globally. The methodology adopted is the survey design in which questionnaires and interviews were used for obtaining data from students. Multistage sampling method was adopted in the research. There are three local government areas in Benin City: Egor, Oredo and Ikpoba-Okha. The simple random sampling method was used to select Egor and Oredo local governments. From the two selected local government areas, twenty private schools were equally drawn and 1000 respondents were randomly selected from the 20 schools. Result shows that there is no availability of Internet access in the schools studied, while Internet usability is very poor as the students perceive so much uneasiness while using the Internet because of its complexities. The result was not unconnected with the use of search engines by the students who claim to know little of Google as the only search engine.