Twitter in initial teacher training: Interaction with social media as a source of teacher professional development for social studies prospective educators

Abstract

The use of social media is now as prevalent as ever, and its educational ramifications still need to be fully explored, especially in initial teacher training. The aim of this study is to analyze social studies prospective teachers’ perceptions regarding the usefulness of social media for teacher professional development, and to generate communication, learning and engagement. This research also has the objective of exploring the effects of an intervention during an academic semester with three different groups of university students, applying a didactic strategy based on the use of Twitter, monitoring the interventions of 122 participants. A quantitative analysis was used to process the information obtained using questionnaires as well as the data obtained using MSocial, a tool for Social Network Analysis (SNA). Results indicate that, while pre-service teachers are not necessarily skeptical of the potential of social media for educational purposes, systematic interventions that promote interaction can positively affect their perception of the usefulness of social media. Results also show that the group where prospective educators interacted among themselves the most using Twitter during the interventions was the one that showed a significant increase in prospective teachers’ perception of the educational potential of social media.