Abstract

The study aims to determine the views of final-year pre-service mathematics teachers towards their experience of the use of dynamic geometry software in teaching, following the implementation processes that they carried out when using this software in a real classroom environment. The study was designed as a case study, which is one of the qualitative research methods. The study was conducted with four pre-service teachers studying in the mathematics teaching department at the education faculty of a university in Turkey during the 2016 to 2017 academic year. As one of the results of the study, it was observed that the pre-service teachers, following the theoretical lessons that they had in the education faculty prior to implementation, gave more limited opinions, whereas during the school experience application of dynamic geometry software, following its application in a classroom environment, they mentioned more features of this software for use in teaching. The pre-service teachers, in relation to their real classroom experiences, expressed their views on the features “concretisation and visualisation”, “possibility of presenting many examples”, “making students feel that mathematics is valuable”, “permanence and facilitation of learning”, and “preventing erroneous mental representations” with regard to the role of dynamic geometry software (DGS) use in teaching and learning. Yet, prior to using DGS in the classroom, these pre-service teachers had given importance only to the “concretisation and visualisation” and “permanence and facilitation of learning” characteristics.

Key words: Dynamic geometry, pre-service mathematics teacher, geometric shapes, views.