A summary of a study on teachers' use of social media

Before teachers' professional learning, I want to mention the distinction between professional development and professional learning. Prestridge (2019) indicated that the distinction between the two terms does not have a clear-cut in educational research fields. Also, she said that the terms are used interchangeably, and teachers usually move seamlessly between formal and informal learning in diverse contexts such as face to face and online. From those descriptions, I could finalize the confusion of the meanings of professional development and professional learning in that professional development refers to integrated activities of teachers' learning for improvement of professional. 

In short, teachers' professional learning is featured as self-generating, self-regulated, and informal learning. Furthermore, they can be regarded as one representation of professional development. While I was reading Prestridge’s (2019) article, a figure below was so impressive to me. The author made a figure presenting relationship and components of teachers’ professional learning in social media. This could be an initial conceptual framework for in-depth research on teachers’ professional learning. It looks needed some more exploration, but I think this is a good start to study teachers’ professional learning in social media.

This research method was so useful for my future research, and I like the classification of the teachers’ use of social media usage and the patterns in each category. This classification contains what teachers do and why they engage in social media activities. In short, this could be a start point to conduct in-depth research.