A Different Experience in a Different Moment? Teachers’ Social Media Use Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Aguilar, Stephen J.; Rosenberg, Joshua M.; Greenhalgh, Spencer P.; Fütterer, Tim; Lishinski, Alex; Fischer, Christian

doi:10.1177/23328584211063898

Cited by 22 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 90 publications

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“…Districts’ posts may represent an appropriate balance between sharing information and two-way communication, especially during a time in which reliable information is highly valued. Districts’ uses of Twitter may mirror educators’, who use this single tool for several different functions, including socializing, sharing one’s work (and about one’s classroom), building a professional network, and crafting a professional identity (Aguilar et al, 2021; Carpenter et al, 2019; Carpenter & Krutka, 2014; Greenhalgh et al, 2020; Kimmons & Veletsianos, 2014; Rosenberg et al, 2020; Trust et al, 2016; Veletsianos & Kimmons, 2016).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“We Are Trying to Communicate the Best We Can”: Understanding Districts’ Communication on Twitter During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Michela¹,

Rosenberg

Kimmons

et al. 2022

AERA Open

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While educators’ uses of social media for purposes such as professional learning and networking are now well-established, our understanding of how educational institutions use social media—including to engage key stakeholders during periods of crisis—is limited. In this study, we used a public data mining research approach to examine how K–12 school districts in the United States used Twitter as a communication tool during a critical period of the COVID-19 pandemic, March-April, 2020. Through a three-step grounded theory approach of 1,357 district tweets from 492 school districts, we found that districts worked to build community and share time-sensitive announcements in alignment with social media crisis communication recommendations. Announcements were more common during the early stages of the pandemic (and were engaged more collaboratively), with community-building posts more common later on. This study demonstrates how researchers can use publicly available (social media) data to understand districts’ communication priorities and strategies during and beyond periods of crisis.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“We Are Trying to Communicate the Best We Can”: Understanding Districts’ Communication on Twitter During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Michela¹,

Rosenberg

Kimmons

et al. 2022

AERA Open

Self Cite

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“…Products. Products include a publication in AERA Open (Aguilar et al, 2021), two papers published in ICER conference proceedings Lishinski et al, 2022), and three papers published in SIGCSE conference proceedings (Rosenberg & Lishinski, 2020b;. The text message-based tool to carry out ESM, Short Message Survey (Lishinski & Rosenberg, 2022), was made available as open-source software through a repository on GitHub.…”

Section: Project Timelinementioning

confidence: 99%

CAREER: Rethinking How Middle and High School Students Analyze and Interpret Ecological Data

Rosenberg¹

2023

Preprint

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There have been prominent and widespread calls for high school science students to work with data in more complex ways that better align with and support the work of professional scientists and engineers (Lee & Wilkerson, 2018; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2019). This is part of the broader practice shift in science education research and standards and more data-intensive areas of study and work—and explorations of the roles of data science at the K-12 levels (Jiang et al., 2022; Wilkerson & Polman, 2020). Although teachers express the desire to do more with data in their science classrooms (Banilower et al., 2018; Rosenberg et al., 2022b), science teachers do not presently have a way to connect the work their students do with data to the science ideas they are working to help their students understand. The result is that students' work with data can be isolated from the sense-making students are doing about science. There is a need and an opportunity to provide science teachers with practical tools that are grounded in the framework of Bayesian data analytic methods that explicitly connect and weigh between initial ideas and empirical evidence. The specific opportunity for using Bayesian methods involves recent advances in informal statistical inference. This type of statistical inference considers how students not only interpret but also how they model data and make probabilistic generalizations from data. This opportunity is bolstered by current emphases on students’ investigations of phenomena as a locus of activity in science classrooms. This project advances middle and high school students' data modeling in ecological contexts by taking a Bayesian approach that is supported and studied as an informal statistical inference framework. It is instantiated through a unit, digital tool, and teacher professional development program for 15 middle grades and 15 high school educators that will be conducted in a way that emphasizes students' data analyses with phenomena of interest that relate to local context for teachers and students. Accordingly, the professional development program will begin with a two-day weekend program at the Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont. A field experiment will compare the students' informal statistical inference capabilities by using qualitative analyses of written embedded assessments of students' probabilistic generalization from empirical data, and changes in the teachers’ confidence engaging their students will be assessed using validated surveys.

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“…This mixed-methods observational study provided insights in how teachers used Twitter as a platform for informal learning solely using tweet data. Future research may extend the data sources, potentially adding another qualitative component to interview teachers about their experiences in participating in social media communities, for instance, by applying an experience sampling approach (Aguilar et al, 2021;Larson & Csikszentmihalyi, 2014) to triangulate research findings. Also, future work is encouraged to examine the impact of teacher participation on Twitter on teachers' knowledge, changes to instructional practice, and student performance more directly, ideally in the form of a randomized controlled field trial.…”

Section: Recommendations For Future Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Standards (Rosenberg et al, 2021). Similarly, we want to encourage replication studies examining teachers' conversations and collaborative practices in social media settings, not limited to Twitter, but also on other prominent platforms such as Reddit, Facebook, or Pinterest (Aguilar et al, 2021;Greenhow et al, 2020). In particular, research that identifies factors contributing to thriving communities of practices of teachers on social media would help advance and scale this inexpensive and accessible form of informal professional learning to many teachers.…”

Section: Recommendations For Future Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

How do Teachers Collaborate in Informal Professional Learning Activities? An Epistemic Network Analysis

Fischer¹,

Omarchevska²,

Fütterer³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Teachers turn to many sources for support and professional learning, including social media-based communities that have shown promise to help teachers access resources and facilitate productive exchanges. Although such online communities show promise, questions about their quality for providing a suitable learning environment remain insufficiently answered. This study examines how teachers’ engagement on Twitter may adhere to characteristics of high-quality professional development activities. In that, we employ advanced conversational analysis techniques that extend the primarily descriptive methods used in prior research. Specifically, we collected data from three Twitter communities related to Advanced Placement Biology (N = 2,040 tweets, N = 93 teachers). Qualitive two-cycle content analyses derived both tweet content and sentiment. Using epistemic network analyses, we examined the collaborative structures to examine how participation patterns can identify characteristics of high-quality teacher professional development. Results indicate that some teachers use Twitter with a content focus and coherent to their individual contexts and prior knowledge. Notably, differences in collaboration and participation patterns by teachers’ overall activity level hint at the existence of an online community of practice. More active teachers communicated more about how their individual contexts relate to instruction, whereas less active teachers exhibited more targeted engagement, for instance, related to sharing teaching resources and organizing learning opportunities. Overall, this study illustrates how Twitter may provide a meaningful learning

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A Different Experience in a Different Moment? Teachers’ Social Media Use Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Cited by 22 publications

References 90 publications

“We Are Trying to Communicate the Best We Can”: Understanding Districts’ Communication on Twitter During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“We Are Trying to Communicate the Best We Can”: Understanding Districts’ Communication on Twitter During the COVID-19 Pandemic

CAREER: Rethinking How Middle and High School Students Analyze and Interpret Ecological Data

How do Teachers Collaborate in Informal Professional Learning Activities? An Epistemic Network Analysis

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