SOCIAL NETWORKING: THE EFFECTIVENESS OF LEARNING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES BY COMPUTER TEACHER EDUCATION CANDIDATES

Technology and education are both the globally focused themes of the knowledge age. Technology is a mean to development and innovations. These are the basis of the 21st century educational systems in order to handle the changing learner needs and learning environments. Effective use of technology facilitates the progress. Use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in education needs to embrace the state-of-art teaching and learning approaches and latest tools. Current approaches are headed for creating social, collaborative and constructive learning environments. These current approaches are in favor of collection of new and emerging Web 2.0 open source web based tools. Web 2.0 technologies are also used in social networks and include blogs, wikis, forums, video and link sharing sites.

The computer teacher candidate students who are taking a core course of IT in education were involved in this research. This course was intended to improve students’ learning and hands-on use of ICT. The effective use of ICT and Web 2.0 technologies in teacher education facilitates candidate teacher’s learning, increase personal uses of technology besides contribute to their future teaching careers.

The students used Web 2.0 technologies within a social network and used collaborative practices in labs during their course work. The aim of this study is to investigate the use of social networks, its affect on supporting teacher candidates’ effective use of ICT, and their final ICT skills that are gained. The IT literacy background analysis is done with a pre-survey and the results at the end of the course semester are done with a post-survey. As a result, the analysis of these surveys and the effects of using social networks for educational purposes especially in information technology education are discussed.

Findings show that there are significant changes in some ICT skills of students which are related to learning outcomes. Also there is an increase in the number of students using various Internet tools. The most impressive outcomes are the students contributions to the social network by writing blogs, forums, adding audio and visual media related to ICT-based learning activities.