The investigation of secondary school mathematics teachers' using process of virtual manipulatives in distance education

As in the past years, even though the educational activities sometimes were achieved through compulsory reasons, sometimes some educational programs are always carried out through distance education. In this study, it was researched what secondary school mathematics teachers had done to enrich their lessons in the distance education process and the processes of using virtual manipulatives in their lessons were examined. In this study, since the teachers' virtual manipulative usage processes will be examined, the case study model, which is one of the qualitative research methods, was used. The research consists of three stages. In the first stage, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the teachers (nine participants) within the scope of the problem situation and in the second stage, within the scope of these interviews, lesson practices were carried out with three teachers who had not have the experience of using virtual manipulatives in their classes. In the third stage, after the lessons, both semi-structured interviews were conducted with three teachers again and mathematics diaries of the lessons in which they used virtual manipulative activities were written by the students. The data of the research were collected with audio/video recordings and written texts, and were analysed through content analysis. In the result of the study, it is observed that the direct lecture method was the most used method/strategy/technique by the teachers in the face-to-face and distance education process, also, other methods, techniques and strategies which were used were almost the same, and there was no difference between the materials used in both face-to-face and distance education. As a result of the first interview with the teachers, it was seen that the teachers were not fully aware of the definition and limits of virtual manipulatives. After the experience of using virtual manipulatives, teachers realized that the use of virtual manipulative, contrary to what they thought, had factors that increased the workload of the teacher. In addition, some teachers and students saw that virtual manipulators allow them to do more examples and exercises in the lesson. Almost all the students stated that the lessons conducted by using virtual manipulative were entertaining, useful, instructive and they liked these activities. It was concluded that, almost all the teachers would want to use virtual manipulators in their next lessons, and they would want to participate if an in-service training program is organized in which virtual manipulators are introduced.