The Effectiveness of social networking in the primary school students' education within the scope of classroom management

Today, it is accepted that students are digital natives; on the other hand, teachers are digital immigrants. In the new century, the meaning of the classroom management changes along with the definitions of new student and teacher. The purpose of this research is to analyze the effectiveness of educational social network on the training of the primary school students as part of classroom management framework. In this research, the mixed research method was used and explanatory mixed method has been adopted as a mixed method. The purposeful sampling was used as the sample. The research sampling group contains 51 fourth grade students who are studying in a primary school of Afyonkarahisar Provincial National Education Directorate in 2014-2015 spring education term. As the part of research application, research group was encouraged to share sources, materials and supporting videos regarding lessons, homework and other issues for 5 weeks on the educational social network. Moreover, sharing materials by using social network provided cooperation among the research sample group. In this study, Scale for the Use of Social Networking in Education, Social Networking Usability Questionnaire and the interactions within the class on educational social network were used as the data collection tool. The descriptive statistics were used while analyzing the data obtained from the study. At the end of the study, the participants indicated that educational social network was a useful tool and these educational social networks provided student-student interaction at the quite high level. It was observed that the educational social network increased the communication, sharing class materials and cooperation among the students. According to the results of this research, it was suggested that the social networks could be used at various levels of the education.