“We Are Trying to Communicate the Best We Can”: Understanding Districts’ Communication on Twitter During the COVID-19 Pandemic

While educators’ uses of social media for purposes such as professional learning and networking are now well-established, our understanding of how educational institutions use social media—including to engage key stakeholders during periods of crisis—is limited. In this study, we used a public data mining research approach to examine how K–12 school districts in the United States used Twitter as a communication tool during a critical period of the COVID-19 pandemic, March-April, 2020. Through a three-step grounded theory approach of 1,357 district tweets from 492 school districts, we found that districts worked to build community and share time-sensitive announcements in alignment with social media crisis communication recommendations. Announcements were more common during the early stages of the pandemic (and were engaged more collaboratively), with community-building posts more common later on. This study demonstrates how researchers can use publicly available (social media) data to understand districts’ communication priorities and strategies during and beyond periods of crisis. © The Author(s) 2022.

A Different Experience in a Different Moment? Teachers’ Social Media Use Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Teachers participate in professional learning activities to enhance their pedagogical knowledge and share best practices—and the increasing role of technologies in education, including social media, is shifting how this professional learning occurs. The COVID-19 pandemic provided an opportunity to consider the role of social media for professional learning. Using intensive longitudinal methods, we repeatedly surveyed 14 teachers’ use of social media both before and during the pandemic (N = 386 total responses). We found patterns in social media platforms uptake and their purposes, but teachers’ use of social media was largely idiosyncratic. Also, teachers demonstrated notable shifts in social media use after the pandemic started;multilevel models indicated that teachers were more likely to use social media to connect and share, especially, as well as learn and follow, compared with before the pandemic. Higher levels of COVID-19-related family stress were also associated with more use of social media to find materials. © The Author(s) 2021.