Today, everything is changing so rapidly due to the development of technology. Technology is a huge part of our lives now. It is everywhere; at home, at school and at work. It has been evolving our lives and everybody has to adapt to the change.
As educators, we have evolved the way and the methods we deliver education. The tools used in the classroom have changed. The teaching and learning journey has become accessible from anywhere and everywhere. It has become more technology-driven. Educators now use various tools from social media to interactive whiteboards, from digital readers to learning management systems and digital testing systems.
Social media tools are the most used tools by everyone. Especially today's generation is very comfortable with the digital world, social media and the constant change in technology. Therefore, their expectation of using the technology in their learning journey has created a new way of connection for the educators. Educators, now also use social media tools to get their students engaged and reach their learning objectives both at school and at home.
Thereby, a survey has been conducted to investigate if social media is used in the classroom if there are any advantages or disadvantages and educators' attitude and opinions on the integration of social media into education.
The survey consists of 14 questions targeted educators, especially ESL Teachers. The first 3 questions are about the respondents' age, gender and profession. The next 2 questions are about their personal usage of social media. 92 educators took part in the survey. You can click here to see the survey questions.
The participants varied from 20 years old to 60 years old. 41% of the participants were between 30 to 40 years old. 79.1% of the participants were female. This gives us the fact that education is still a female-dominated field despite all the gender diversity efforts.
71% of the participants were ESL teachers. On the grounds of the findings, it is expected that the attitude of the ESL teachers towards the integration of social media into education is measured here.
Not surprisingly, all the respondents use some sort of social media tool personally. The survey indicates that 92.3% of the educators use Instagram, followed by 89% use youtube, 74.7% use Facebook and 48% of the respondents use Twitter.
In this study, also the reasons and motivation of the social media use were investigated. Some of the expected responses were given in the survey and also the respondents were asked to add an additional reason for using social media in their personal lives. While according to
Petter Bae Brandtzaeg, the most important reason for the general public's use of social media is to get in contact with new people; this survey indicates that ESL Teachers have a different motive for using social media. 77% of our respondents stated that their most important reason is to get news; followed by to expand their professional knowledge and network with 73%. Following celebrities seems to be one of their least important motivation with 28%.
This survey suggests that educators use social media in their personal lives for various reasons including sharing and collaborating. Following these findings, the educators were also asked if they should make use of these tools in teaching and learning. This study revealed that 53.3% of the respondents agreed on using social media, while 34.4% were not sure. Some educators, keeping the disadvantages in mind, added another option as it should depend on the learning objectives.
Despite some hesitation of the social media integration, interestingly, this survey also indicates that respondents do not consider YouTube as a social media tool. Because 48 respondents answered yes to the question if social media should be used in the classroom while 80 respondents also stated that they use YouTube for educational purposes which is 90.9% of total respondents; followed by Webinars with 36.4%. This survey proves that social media tools have become essential tools in education. The respondents were actually given the main, well known social media tools as options, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Webinar, they felt adding additional tools like Teams, Kahoot and Jamboard that they benefit from for their teaching and learning.
Taking into consideration that about 90% of the respondents live and work in Turkey both in public and private schools; these findings indicate that the technology infrastructure in Turkey is quite strong and social media is embraced and valued vastly with great enthusiasm in education. Since social media is part of our lives, teachers now support their lessons and achieve better learning outcomes by using social media. In this part, participants were asked how they integrate social media into their lessons. We can comfortably say that social media is used in many ways from viewing materials to searching information, and from collaborating with students and teachers to collaborating with other schools. The survey results show that 92% of the educators use social media tools to view pictures and videos related to the topic they are teaching, followed by 78% use to search for information and/or have students search information. Furthermore, it is not surprising to find out that 35.6% of educators use social media to promote their school. Many schools have their school and/or department pages on social media where they share the activities, important days and schedules at their schools.
Collaborative learning has been proved to be one of the most engaging methods for years now. Therefore using technology has become very convenient and extremely engaging for students for collaboration. According to this survey, 38.2% of educators have already organised and conducted projects using social media tools. An education consultant from an ESL publishing company stated that they organize competitions on social media. Here are some of the projects that our respondents worked on with their students:
- Recycling awareness project on Instagram
- Brick by Brick discussions on Yammer
- Book review project by getting students to create their own google sites.
- E-twinning and Erasmus projects using Twitter and Instagram
- Speaking club of Russian teachers on social media
- Skype-a-Thon event where students around the world meet each other
- Collaborating on blogs reviews
- Eco-schools video campaign
- Project competitions on Facebook, where students voted for the best one
- Film making competition shared on YouTube
- Reading project on Instagram and Twitter
Although the rise of social networking tools at first attracted distance learning, it became so popular in the classrooms as well in order to meet the younger generations' interests after noticing the potential benefits of this technology. In this survey, we also investigated the opinions of educators on the advantages and disadvantages of technology integration into education. We provided some general advantages and asked the respondents to add to these. 43 respondents strongly agree that social media tools increase teacher collaboration. This study has revealed that more than half of the respondents strongly agree on the potential benefits of these tools in education. However, as stated in the graphics below, the respondents hesitated on choosing the strongly agree option when it comes to increasing the quality of the delivery.
In addition to these benefits, our respondents also added that these tools help teachers with their professional development needs, enables both teachers and students to learn about other cultures and improve communication and reading skills.
We all know that social media is a very effective tool to enhance learning, however, the disadvantages also have to be taken into account for effective and productive learning and teaching environment. In this survey, we provided some estimated disadvantages to the respondents and asked them if they agree or not with the given statements. This question reveals that the respondents feel the disadvantages can be avoided. According to the graphic below, most of the respondents only stated to agree with the statements rather than strongly agree. It is also interesting to see that some of the educators are not threatened by cyberbullying and privacy issues. This shows that educators are aware of using the technology in an effective way and they can avoid these issues.
The participants were also asked to add to these disadvantages and the responses are:
- the information may not be reliable
- the information changes too quickly
- some of the tools are not child friendly and there isn't an option to switch it to a child-friendly account
- can cause cheating which affects the creativity of the students
- not for all age groups
- advertisements and pop-up viruses
- teaching style may not be compatible with the tools used
The participants also suggested some additional ways to use these tools more effectively. According to the findings, they feel that disadvantages can be controlled by setting and implementing guidelines and boundaries for each learning community. Besides, they feel that teachers have to be trained well to prevent students from abusing the opportunities the technology provides.
In this study, the social media tools have been investigated and educators' attitude towards the integration of these social media tools have been studied. It is clear that educators are very good at keeping up with the fast-changing technology world and working very hard to put it to the best use to enhance the learning and teaching process as much as they can. This study also reveals that technology can not and will never replace teachers; It is the teachers who act as decision-makers and facilitators to make these tools used in the best way possible to provide better learning environments to the students.
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