An examination of a Facebook group as a teacher professional development tool

The aim of this case study was to find out whether teachers can benefit from Facebook, a widely used social media tool, as an online professional development tool. For this purpose, a teacher group on Facebook was chosen within the frame of criteria that had been set by the researcher. The postings and comments in the selected group whose name was Ġlkokul Ġngilizce Öğretmenleri Platformu were saved until the required data were gathered. Thus, the data covering 15 days were found sufficient. The study adopted instrumental case study. As a result, content analysis of 633 postings and 3690 comments was done with the help of the qualitative data analysis software called Nvivo 8 and Nvivo 11. Firstly, the content analysis was done by using the low-level coding approach and as a result, 469 lowlevel codes emerged. Next, the codes that had the same meaning were aggregated and consequently 106 codes were generated. The codes were gathered under 10 categories and one sub-category. As for the categories, they were gathered under four themes: a) learning process, b) government regulation on teachers, c) likingappreciation-reproach, and d) non-relevant issues. As for the validity and reliability process of the study, in order to ensure credibility, transferability, dependability and confirmability criteria used in the qualitative studies, some techniques in the literature were used. The results showed that teachers mostly shared about learning process and teachers, especially, exchange opinions about activities and materials. Teachers also exchanged opinions about government regulation on teachers, and teacher candidates benefited from the group. Furthermore, teachers communicated with each other and helped one another about non-relevant issues. Additionally, teachers appreciated and thanked each other for the sharing. In sum, the group examined for this study was found to be beneficial for the teachers with regard to teacher professional development.