The role of social network on providing career development of teachers

Technology takes place in every part of our lives and mobile devices are becoming common nowadays. Social network is one of the tools that has been an important part of people's lives. Social network users and the time they spend on social network increase rapidly as in the world. The usage of social network is becoming common among education officials and teachers, so this situation gives an opinion about the usage of it on teachers' career development. Current social networks include so many distracting features like games and applications, therefore the usage of them on education has many disadvantages. Educational social metwork eliminates these disadvantages and by means of its features, it is the most suitable environment that meet educational needs. The aim of this study is developing an educational social network that provides teachers' career improvement and then test it on a group of teachers to determine educational and general usability and effectiveness on teachers' career development. In this research, an educational social networking site is used which has been developed by Gündüz (2014) and published on www.mavikurdele.net. The educational social networking site which was developed for the teachers and school managers' usage has tasks, questionnaires, bulletins, activities, colleague interaction and file sharing as well as the social networking sites' characteristics. Educational social networking site has been tested on 27 teachers from a secondary school in Afyonkarahisar province of Turkey for six weeks. One shot case study method has been used and the data collected by scale of social networks' educational use on teachers' career development, educational social network teacher usability opinion survey and log records of the site. While examining the obtained data, descriptive statistic was used and it was presented with frequency and percentage tables. As a result, teachers who used educational social network expressed that the educational features of social networking sites is useful and helpful for their career development.