USING COMMUNICATION AND COLLABORATION TOOLS IN VIRTUAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS MOODLE FOR MATHEMATICS IN PRIMARY SCHOOL

Abstract

With the advancement of information and communication technologies, teaching mathematics in a real-life classroom is combined with teaching in a virtual learning environment (VLE). It is important to determine how a primary school teacher can use VLE communication and collaboration tools to teach mathematics primary school students. Participants – 4th grade students ((n = 51). Access to quantitative studies has been chosen for the study. Methods of study: Analysis of scientific literature, testing, descriptive statistics, and inference statistics. Data from the pilot study and the educational experiment were processed using version 23 of the IBM SPSS Statistical Package for Social Sciences. The normality of the variable distribution was tested using the Shapiro-Wilk test. Throughout the research, decisions are taken at a value a = 0.05. Study adhered to the fundamental principles of the European Code of Conduct for Study Ethics. The curator of the education was in contact with the students and their parents by e-mail and using the VLE communication and collaboration tools (messages, forums, feedback). The aim was to find out whether the number of emails and messages sent by the curator affected the students’ learning time in the VLE. The hypothesis of zero Pearson coefficient equality in the population is checked. There was a statistically significant weak relationship between the number of emails sent by the curator of the curriculum, the number of messages for students and the time spent by the student for the lessons of the curriculum. There was a mean relationship in the boy’s group, but there was no statistically significant relationship in girls’ group. There was also a statistically significant weak relationship between e-mails sent by the curriculum curator, the number of messages sent to students and the evaluation of the lessons of the curriculum. There was an average relationship in the boy’s group, but in the girl’s group there was no statistically significant relationship between the emails sent by the tutor, the number of messages to students and the evaluation of the lessons of the curriculum. This confirms the theory of constructivism that VLE is suitable for education because teachers can act as learning facilitators to communicate with each other during learning.