Twitter in Education: Perceptions of Pre-Service Teachers
Twitter in Education: Perceptions of Pre-Service Teachers

Summary/Abstract: The aim of this study is to determine the perceptions of students with regard to the use of Twitter within education. Participants of the study were 17 junior class Education Faculty students from the Computer Education and Instructional Technology Department of a private university in Turkey. At the beginning of the course, the instructor requested students to sign up for Twitter and follow her tweets. Then the instructor created a hashtag for the lesson and, over the duration of the course, shared course announcements and related papers using this hashtag. Students also tweeted about the summary course content covered during face-to-face lessons. At the end of the course, a questionnaire captured students' perceptions with regard to the use of Twitter within education through five open-ended questions. Content analysis was applied to analyse the qualitative data. By using Twitter in their courses, participants had the opportunity to engage in what they described as a different, useful, entertaining, efficient, and good activity. Students expressed that they liked writing and finding tweets by using the hashtag, facilitating the sharing of information, and that it enhanced their understanding of content through tweets, by following announcements, being aware of the tweets to others, retweeting the instructor's tweets, learning to negotiate a different social network, and that Twitter itself was interesting and motivating.

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