An Analysis of #TECHtalkGA: A weekly Twitter chat for Educators in Georgia
Location
Technology: Professional Development and Instruction - Boston 2/3
Proposal Track
Research Project
Session Format
Presentation
Abstract
Twitter, a social media platform, has been embraced by educators as a way to form professional learning networks (PLN) to support student success (Coleman et al., 2018). Twitter offers just-in-time access to professional development, and the ability to share information and resources with colleagues all around the world (Carpenter & Krutka, 2014). State-level Twitter chats organized with labels called hashtags are thriving (Rosenberg et al, 2016) and are promising venues for educators’ professional growth and educational research.
#TECHtalkGA is a weekly Twitter chat used by educators in Georgia to discuss educator and student use of educational technologies. To understand the nature of activity in this PLN, we captured tweets for nine months starting from January 2019 (n = 3235). We analyzed the data for basic descriptive statistics and its content using the quandeta package in R (Benoit, et al., 2018). Quendeta allowed us to computationally analyze the data against predefined categories (e.g., positive emotion, cognitive process, etc.) (Pennebaker et al., 2015). Analyses revealed that there were categories that occurred significantly more than others, such as positive emotions, t(3234) = 42.809, p < 000.1. Other significant findings and their implications for education and student success will be discussed during the presentation.
Keywords
teacher professional development, Twitter, social media, PLN, informal learning
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Akcaoglu, Mete and Hodges, Charles B., "An Analysis of #TECHtalkGA: A weekly Twitter chat for Educators in Georgia" (2019). Georgia Educational Research Association Conference. 18.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/gera/2019/2019/18
An Analysis of #TECHtalkGA: A weekly Twitter chat for Educators in Georgia
Technology: Professional Development and Instruction - Boston 2/3
Twitter, a social media platform, has been embraced by educators as a way to form professional learning networks (PLN) to support student success (Coleman et al., 2018). Twitter offers just-in-time access to professional development, and the ability to share information and resources with colleagues all around the world (Carpenter & Krutka, 2014). State-level Twitter chats organized with labels called hashtags are thriving (Rosenberg et al, 2016) and are promising venues for educators’ professional growth and educational research.
#TECHtalkGA is a weekly Twitter chat used by educators in Georgia to discuss educator and student use of educational technologies. To understand the nature of activity in this PLN, we captured tweets for nine months starting from January 2019 (n = 3235). We analyzed the data for basic descriptive statistics and its content using the quandeta package in R (Benoit, et al., 2018). Quendeta allowed us to computationally analyze the data against predefined categories (e.g., positive emotion, cognitive process, etc.) (Pennebaker et al., 2015). Analyses revealed that there were categories that occurred significantly more than others, such as positive emotions, t(3234) = 42.809, p < 000.1. Other significant findings and their implications for education and student success will be discussed during the presentation.
