Abstract:

This research was designed in a phenomenology pattern with a qualitative research method in order to determine the views of secondary school 7th grade students about the use of virtual museums in the Social Studies course. The participants of the study consisted of 100 students studying in the 7th grade in a secondary school in Arnavutköy, Istanbul in the spring semester of the 2020-2021 academic year. Since the education continued remotely due to the Covid-19 epidemic, the study was carried out online and an exemplary virtual museum tour was made by giving information about virtual museums in online lessons held via the zoom application. Afterwards, the virtual tour links of the War of Independence Museum and the Republic Museum were sent to the students, and they were given worksheets prepared by the researchers to use in their virtual museum tour. After the virtual museum visit, the virtual museum opinion form consisting of open-ended questions was shared and the students were asked to answer the questions in the form in writing. The obtained data were analyzed with the descriptive analysis technique, the data were tabulated and presented with frequencies and supported by direct quotations. At the end of the research; it was concluded that the students thought that making virtual museum trips in the social studies course would contribute to learning, that virtual museum tours created an alternative to museum trips, eliminating time and space restrictions, enriching the course environment and making the learning-teaching process fun. Although students like to take a virtual museum tour as a lesson activity; they emphasized that they felt the museum atmosphere and found it more informative, lively and entertaining than the virtual tour, and stated that they preferred museum tours to virtual museum tours.

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