Author(s): Ãmer Faruk TAVÅANLI, Birsen Berfu AKAYDIN
The time period called as the information and technology age has not only caused many changes in human life, but also led to diversification of reading habits, reading styles and reading sources. Today, in addition to the traditional reading types in order to access information, the reading types such as electronic reading, screen reading, and social media reading can be used as well. The development of technology has come to enable people to share their thoughts and works in various virtual environments. The spread of these sharing and the increase in the number of people they reach out have led to the emergence of a new field of reading called social media literacy. Social media literacy is based on examining and evaluating the different views of different issues with different dimensions. At this point, it is necessary for educators to think about how to use the social media areas to benefit students and to develop practical application. Based on this, the purpose of the research is to reveal the ideas of primary school teachers about social media and social media literacy. Thus, the primary school teachers will learn about the social media and social media literacy and will be offered advice on how social media tools can be better adapted to their teaching and learning activities. In the present study, the descriptive phenomenology description, one of the qualitative research designs, was used. In general, the aim of the descriptive phenomenology studies is to describe the perceptions of the individuals, which come from their experiences of a fact, concept or a situation. The data of the present study were obtained from the primary school teachers through the semi-structured interviews. The sound-recorded interviews obtained were transcribed by the researchers and shown to the participants once again in order to get their approval for the final state of the interviews. In the present study, the content analysis method was used in order to determine the existence of words, concepts and characters in the texts and reveal the underlying relationships between them. According to the results obtained as a result of the analysis, it is seen that primary school teachers expressed 214 statements under 5 themes. These themes were; "What is social media?", "What is social media literacy?", "The harms of social media", "The benefits of social media" and "How should social media be used?". While the social media benefits were divided into two headings such as individual and educational, the theme of social media harms was itself divided into three headings such as individual, social and educational. Teachers expressed their opinions about the benefits of social media the most.
The Journal of International Social Research received 7760 citations as per Google Scholar report
