Using Twitter to Form Professional Learning Communities: An Analysis of Georgia K-12 School Personnel Discussing Educational Technology on Twitter

Introduction

Teachers are required to maintain their professional knowledge, and the process of maintaining current professional knowledge often is described as professional development. Professional development can be categorized as formal or informal (Hodges, 2015). Formal professional development often is experienced in traditional formats such as face-to-face workshops, conference sessions, or webinars led by an expert or experts. Informal professional development may take many forms, but increasingly online social networking tools are utilized. Professional development was the most common educational purpose for social networking identified in the reviewed literature (Galvin & Greenhow, 2020, p. 21).

In addition to formal forms of teacher professional development, teachers have accepted informal professional development experiences such as EdCamp meetings or online professional learning networks (e.g. Carpenter, 2014; Trust et al., 2014). One platform for informal online professional development has been through communicating (e.g., sharing resources) through social media (Rosenberg et al., 2016; Greenhalgh et al., 2020). These informal professional development experiences are typically not led by a single expert, but are led by teachers, for teachers. The focus of this paper is a specific use of the free-to-access online service Twitter (http://www.twitter.com) as a professional learning network by education professionals. .