Skip to main content

Key Findings in Tweet me, message me, like me: using social media to facilitate pedagogical change within an emerging community of practice

I found this article from the readings to be very interesting. I love to examine all the ways professional learning communities can form, especially via social media platforms. Having the ability to learn from and engage with educators across the world, rather than just the bubble of your in-person community, is a huge game changer. I have examined the major takeaways of this study below.

1. Prior Engagement Leverage: using platforms like Twitter and Facebook served as a catalyst for teacher engagement. These are platforms that many already used and had an interest in, and it is easier to engage with a platform you already know how to use or use on a daily basis. This kept interest levels high. 

2. Facilitator Role: facilitators were vital to ensuring discussion was based in pedagogy and that discussion was effective and meaningful. Good facilitators ensured that social media did not become a burden to the process of the CoP. 

3. Development of CoP: Social media served as a space for a wider variety of people to meet, engage, inquire, and collaborate with peers that they may have not met otherwise. 

4. Support of Long-Term Pedagogical Change: Teachers were able to sustain and evolve their practice over time as they could constantly refer back to the online community despite the passage of time. 

Overall, this article showed me that online communities of practice offer a flexible and engaging space for collaboration and refining educational practice. I have seen this in some groups I am in on Facebook, like Florida Teachers Unite and ELA Teacher Support. People can turn to these groups with questions and share resources and best practice ideas at no cost and with ease. 

Comments

  1. nickinickelzJune 29, 2025 at 9:59 AM

    I enjoyed your summary! It's so true that teachers are more likely to participate when using platforms they’re already familiar with. Being in teacher Facebook groups myself, I agree that these spaces make it easy to revisit ideas and sustain growth over time.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thoughts from Middle Schoolers

  How do middle school students see technology as affecting their education and lives?  This week I decided to sit down and have some conversations with my students before releasing them for the summer. I asked them specifically how they felt technology had influenced their education and social lives. These were some of the responses I got, paraphrased from the general Gen Z vernacular: "I think that technology can be cool, but it can also be repetitive. Some teachers do the same things over and over, which gets old."  'I wish I could only be on my Chromebook all the time. It's more fun than anything else in class."  "I don't want technology to take over my life. I think the 90s were cool, people talked to each other more." "Okay, but I talk to people all the time, just on my phone."  "My chromebook helps me learn, I don't like doing book work because it is boring,"  "I like book work, I can understand it better."  ...
2 comments
Read more

The Effects of Social Media in the Classroom

  Link to Article This week I found an interesting article on the effects social media can have on student academics. The study uses a mixed methodology of interviews, literature reviews, and data analysis of found patterns.  Overall, this article found that social media has an overall negative effect on student's grades, focus, attention span, and classroom behavior.  HOWEVER.  I find that the educators and students identified and analyzed in this article are rooted in extremely traditional educational values and rules. I think it is rather obvious that social media would not be beneficial to the traditional classroom. These methods are generally rooted in lecture, work, and assessment, with little room for choice outside of what the teacher leads. Social media does not have to "undermine learning" in high school classrooms.  The world has changed so much in the last 10 years alone. I graduated from high school in 2013, and we were just getting to the point whe...
1 comment
Read more

Week 11 Reflection

 This week, the majority of my energy went towards my produsage assignment. For my project, I chose to focus on something that I can use at the middle school where I work: a lesson on literary analysis. This is a concept that can be difficult to teach, especially when you have students who hate reading. The traditional "assign a story and answer questions about it" is not engaging to this generation of students. Asking them to read independently can be like pulling teeth, depending on the class.  My project was created with the goal of combining traditional reading, writing, and analysis skills with the engagement of social media. Analysis can happen in so many forms, so I thought sites like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook would serve as great mediums for showcasing their analysis. It gives them a choice in how they would like to present their analysis: they could create a TikTok from the perspective of a character, create a moodboard on Pinterest that reflects the theme of t...
Post a Comment
Read more