Abstract:

Social networks have been incorporated into the daily habits of most people, making the access the information anytime, anywhere possible. Due to its success, its use has been introduced in the education sector, responding to the needs demanded by today's society, being used as a tool to improve the teaching and learning processes.

From an educational point of view, we can point out the following features: it is an environment with multiple tools, it facilitates the interaction between student and teacher, it supports asynchronous interaction and it can be used for the exchange of knowledge and to expand it.

Currently with the aim of taking advantage of these features, many experiences have been developed in the context of high school in order to check whether the teaching and learning processes have been improved.

Our work aims to determine whether, in the Spanish-speaking community, the use of social networks as a tool in education, improves the teaching and learning processes, contributing to the achievement of meaningful learning for students, and specifying what educational activities are carried out with this tool in the field of secondary education.

The methodology that has been used in this study has been a systematic review of the literature. Namely, we have reviewed the most relevant publications in the latest years trying to answer the following research questions:
• Does the use of social networks contribute in education contribute to obtain a significant learning in the students?
• What purpose is the use of social networks in education: explain context, tutorship, etc?
• What kind of methodologies are used in its application to teaching?
• Is its use highly accepted by students? Are they satisfied with its use in teaching?
• Is its use highly accepted by teachers? Are they satisfied with its use in teaching?
• What are the main social networks used in teaching?

In the paper we present the process followed to carry out the systematic review. Namely, this process is divided in two steps: first, planning the systematic review and, second, performing the systematic review. In first phase, we have defined the search protocol (key terms, combinations, search strategy, log of results) and the definition of the review process of the results obtained. The second phase is composed of the following subprocesses: primary studies search, selecting primary studies, data management and collection, and, finally, data synthesis. For this systematic review we have based on the results provided by Google Scholar from 2010 in order to guarantee that we have provided conclusion based on the most recent works in the field. Based on the results we have answered to the different research questions that we have mentioned above.

The results of this systematic review concluded that the use of social networking in education does contribute to the achievement of meaningful learning, being the learning by discovery the main methodology used, by means both vertical and horizontal social networks to perform activities in the classroom such as the creation of groups and performing tutorship.

Keywords:

Social networks, systematic review.