The use of social networks by teachers

The fast development of technology enables educational environments to be diverse and gives way to many novel tools and mothods.With the transformation from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 environment, social networks emerged and the usage of social networks in the educational settings emerged as an option. This study has been conducted in order to investigate the teachers' educational use of social networks in terms of communication, cooperation and resource/material usage. Survey method has been used as research method. The study group is made up of teachers of randomly selected schools in Eyüp İstanbul in 2014-2015 educational year. The data about the usage of social networking sites by teachers have been obtained with " Social network sites usage questionnaire" and "Facebook educational usage scale" that was developed by Mazman (2009). 257 teachers have participated in the research and the data from 213 teachers who used social networks have been analyzed. In order test the normality of the data, Kolmogorov Smirnov-Z Test has been apllied. The data and the frequency distributions have been evaluated in the SPSS 21 package programme with Independent Sample t-Test, Mann Whitney U, One-Way Anova and Kruskal Wallis test. As a result, no signficant difference has been found regarding teachers' gender, branches, educutional level and the institution they worked for in terms of the usage of social networking for educational purposes. A significant difference has been found in the "cooperation" sub-factor according to teachers' ages regarding the usage of Facebook for educational purposes. The teachers who think that social networks can increase the quality and be used effectively in education and those who have their istitution's own groups in social networks have more positive opinions about social notworks' educational usage. It has been determined that when the teachers' social network usage and the time spent on it increases, they tend to have more positive opinions about communication and the usage of social networks for educational purposes. In addition, it has been determined that the teachers' opinions about the subfactors such as "communication", "cooperation" and "resource/material sharing" are positive. Key words: Social Network, Educational Social Network, Facebook