Investigation of Science Teachers' Integrating Educational Technologies into the COVID-19 Pandemic Process

The ability to use educational technologies in distance education is very important during the COVID pandemic process. The aim of this study is to determine the competencies and needs of science teachers in using technology in the COVID-19 pandemic distance education process. The research was carried out with phenomenology techniques, one of the qualitative methods. Data were collected by applying semi-structured interview forms containing 7 open-ended questions to 21 science teachers working in the central districts of Manisa province, then analyzed via consent analysis method. Finally, by creating themes and codes, frequency and percentage distributions were revealed to understand and, when the findings were examined, the biggest obstacles to distance education were the internet connection, infrastructure-hardware problems and the inability to discipline students. Students entering the online lesson with their cameras closed, the noise from the home environment, and could not join online lesson were reflected in the opinions of the participants as problems. If our students are more active by making presentations, these problems will be minimized and the quality of distance education maximize. It was observed that although science teachers having experience in using technology are more active, science teachers with insufficient experience in using technology could not conduct scientific experiments for their students in the distance education process. In addition, integrating different student-centered educational techniques and measurement-evaluation activities with technology are other problems.