Source: Teaching and Teacher Education 60 (2016) 131-143
(Reviewed by the Team Portal)
This study examines pre-service teacher (PST) perceptions of educational and professional uses of the social media platform Twitter.
Methods
The participants were 153 pre-service teacher (PST) from two universities in the United States and Spain used Twitter for course assignments.
Data were collected through online survey and participants' written reflections on their Twitter experiences.
Discussion
The findings reveal that participants from two countries perceived Twitter to have definite learning applications. Furthermore, it was found that a majority of PSTs from both countries perceived benefits from the access Twitter provided them to in-service educators, and expressed intentions to continue collaborating with other educators via Twitter.
The authors also found that the majority of participants anticipated at least some future professional use of Twitter.
However, pre-service teachers from both countries shared relatively less positive perceptions regarding Twitter use with their future students.
The authors suggest that teacher educators may need to provide PSTs examples of appropriate uses of Twitter with their students, such as for formative assessment or to elicit wider participation in classroom discussions.
The authors suggest that Twitter appears to be a social networking service that can be of use to PSTs and in-service educators alike. They argue that teacher educators and the PSTs with whom they work can both benefit from Twitter-facilitated access to innovative educators, schools, and programs that would not otherwise be available to them.Â