The study investigates the effective utilization of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) by first year undergraduates of the University of Botswana (UB) in their reading and writing skills. The first year students are not first language (L1) learners of English. They have not utilized computers for learning reading and writing in their basic education and have not been exposed to such Learning Management Systems (LMS) as Blackboard and Moodle at the secondary school level. Consequently, at the university, when they are required to utilize computers in reading and writing in their core courses, this becomes a huge challenge. This paper investigates how UB first year undergraduates utilize the computer as an ICT tool in their reading and writing skills using the quantitative and qualitative research methods. A questionnaire was administered to 200 students enrolled in both ICT 121 and ENG 131 courses during the second semester of 2013/2014 academic year. In addition, interviews and classroom observations over the same period were conducted by the researchers. The constructivist theory of learning formed the theoretical framework. The findings reveal that most first year students have difficulty in downloading and uploading course materials using the LMS platforms; they are also unaware of the silent interactive communication offered by the computer as an ICT tool. The researchers recommend that first year undergraduate students should be given lots of practice on the use of the LMSs and computer skills for effective performance in their academic work.