Abstract:

Social media have grown rapidly in popularity in a relatively short time. The motives for using social media have been widely studied but most of these studies focus on exploring people’s reasons for participating in online communities. Thus, this study aims to discover cognitive motivations that promote Islamic Education teachers to use WhatsApp as a platform for professional development. Online questionnaire was used to survey 133 teachers. The results revealed that most teachers believed that social media can play a good role in exploring good practices in teaching, accessing the latest research, statistics, photos, videos, sounds, received the highest means and learning more about using technology in classrooms. However, the sample indicated to the lack of using WhatsApp for attending or knowing about online educational courses or participating in local, national and international conferences. Regarding the overall score, the results show that the Islamic education teachers use WhatsApp for the purpose of professional development with cognitive motives at the level "every time" as the overall mean was (3.41) with Std. Deviations of 0.79. Moreover, the results revealed that there was no significant difference among teachers in relation to any of the study variables.

The implications of these findings encourage the decision makers to promote the use of social media and WhatsApp to provide professional development program for large number of teacher with no limit of time, location or cost.

Keywords:

Professional development, social media, training, teaching, WhatsApp.