Reinventing the 21st century educator

Social media to engage and support the professional learning of teachers

Abstract

Learning for the professions has grown beyond mere consumption of knowledge and become a knowledge creation process. The new effective teacher must think more about process than content, enabling learners to operate in the digital world rather than learn a discrete body of facts. The paper will present the teaching and learning possibilities accompanying the social, participatory and collaborative tools that have emerged in the Web 2.0 era. For beginning teachers, competence in e-learning and the capacity to employ these tools to support lifelong professional learning is essential. As technologies continue to change, there is a now a stronger emphasis on teacher learning and that is proactive, experiential and mediated by digital tools. The complexity of teachers learning and teachers' knowledge is acknowledged and theorised, and evidence is presented that digital tools and their affordances can enable and support teacher learning in a number of productive ways.