Use of social networks for educational purposes among pre-service it teachers

The purpose of the current study was to investigate the acceptance processes pertaining to instructional use of social networking sites among pre-service information technology teachers. A sequential mixed method was implemented where both qualitative and quantitative methods were used together to expand the findings of the study. To answer the research questions, the application was realized in four phases. In the first phase, 53 pre-service IT education teachers at Anadolu University provided data, which helped the researcher to gain detailed information and develop scale items. According to the needs reported by the participants, a blended learning environment was created, which consisted of both social networking site and face-to-face activities. The activities in the environment lasted 14 weeks. In the second phase of the study, a scale was developed regarding the use and acceptance of social networking sites for educational purposes. To conduct the pilot implementations and factor analyses, the data were gathered from IT pre-service teachers at Anadolu University and Eskişehir Osmangazi University. In the next phase of the study, a general implementation of the scale was realized with participants who were determined through the combination of hierarchical cluster and random sampling. This sample represented all subsets in the "2012 Ranking of Turkish Universities in Social Sciences" published by URAP (University Ranking by Academic Performance). A total of 567 freshman and senior IT education students from seven state universities responded to the scale, which had a response rate of 66,36 percent. In the last phase, the aim was to investigate the factors influencing the use and acceptance of social networking sites for educational purposes. In this regard, semi-structured interviews were conducted with four students (2 freshmen and 2 seniors) from outlier universities. While the quantitative data were gathered through the questionnaires and the scale, the qualitative data were gathered through observations, interviews and the logs of the social networking sites. The quantitative data were analyzed with SPSS 20 which facilitated calculation of descriptive statistics, exploratory factor analysis and parametric tests. The significance level was set as 0.05. In addition, LISREL 8.0 was used to conduct confirmatory factor analysis on the scale. The qualitative data were analyzed through content analysis and inductive coding. According to the findings of both in-class observations and scale, IT pre-service teachers' use and acceptance of social networking sites was influenced by performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence and behavioral intention which explained 64,37% of the variance. Accompanied by these findings, the study revealed that students at the departments of CEIT had positive intentions to use social networking sites for educational purposes. Findings further showed that the level of use and acceptance of social networking sites among CEIT students varied with regard to gender and university, but not with regard to the class level. As a result of these findings, a question whether the students' adoption levels were influenced by the current curriculum of CEIT departments emerged. Along with the findings of semi-structure interviews, it was found that the curriculum of the CEIT departments had no effect on the students' use and acceptance of social networking sites for educational purposes. On the other hand, it was observed that the nature of the difference could be explained by the actual in-class use of the instructors in different universities.