USING SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS IN EDUCATIONAL AND EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITIES: A HASHTAG REVIEW

Abstract

With the growing interest in online learning, the new understanding of education seeks ways to involve students in asynchronous knowledge content. Building on experiences with using hashtags to connect to social media platforms, the aim of this study is to explore the impact of hashtag use on student engagement in online discussions. In this study, it has been tried to reveal in which context students use hashtags, whether including hashtags in educational processes can contribute to the development of students and whether hashtags can support creating a learning community. For doing this, 36 randomly selected volunteer students studying in the 12th grade were conducted for focus group discussion. Quantitative measures were collected and analyzed to assess student interactions. Observations were made to understand the students' hashtag usage methods and to determine their interactions with each other. The content analysis about the obtained data was examined objectively with a systematic including the information obtained from the qualitative interviews. The hashtags used through the coding scheme were developed using the inductive and deductive approach. Considering the results of the study, it is understood that especially Twitter social platform hashtags give strong motivation to students in terms of educational activities and hashtags contributes to the ability to communicate synchronously and asynchronously with other individuals in the learning community; furthermore it is realised that hashtag is an application that should be supported since it has positive aspects such as creating an environment for students to express their ideas freely.