Teachers' Participation in an Online Educational Social Network

Online social networks are considered to promote connectivity and collaboration among groups of people. Educational social networks can help to reduce a nagging problem of teacher isolation and to provide a space for teachers' voices to be heard from the classroom. Benefits of participation in an online educational social network included knowledge sharing, knowledge building and socialization. However, teachers also indicated challenges with time, motivation, work priorities and ease in using the site. Teachers constructed their learning on the site but shared reservedly, preferring to be readers or content consumers rather than writers or content producers. Five roles of participation in an online social network are suggested to include a role of window-shopper, a non-committed viewer of content. Teacher leadership also emerged on the site and was demonstrated by active engagement and support of peer online learning. Differing teacher identities are revealed through interesting vignettes of participants. This book allows the reader to gain insight into Trinidadian online teacher behaviour and to draw parallels to behaviours offline for future research.