Browsing by Author "Halonen, Ville"

The goals. The goal of this study is to find out how the class teacher students who study at the Helsinki university find the utilisation of social media in schools and what kind of abilities the current class teacher education provides in order for taking advantage of social media as part of teaching. The assumption was that social media would provide added value to teaching and learning, but the education provided by the university wouldn’t provide proper abilities. The research idea stems from the curriculum, which deals with the skills that school should provide pupils. These skills are, for example, interaction with the environment, as well as ability to search for, produce, edit, and share information and ideas. The impressions of those class teacher students who are graduating soon about social media in teaching are partly defining how pupils´ skills develop in the above-mentioned issues. The research methods. This research is carried out as a case study. For the purposes of this study, two class teacher students were interviewed by means of semi-structured theme interview. Both of the students were interviewed once and the interviews lasted around 25 minutes. The interviews were transcribed within two weeks after they had been taken place and after that the material was analyzed by means of data-driven content analysis. The results and conclusions. The results of the study confirmed the notion that social media brings added value to education, in particular by motivating pupils. Still, the class teacher students who participated in this study couldn’t think of concrete ways of working with social media. Results concerning the ability provided by the education were not consistent. One of the interviewees considered that the abilities provided by the education is incomplete, whereas the other felt that they were sufficient.