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Educators must consider how today's technology-mediated environments expand our conceptualization of learning contexts and the continuities and tensions between learning and participation in various settings. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted educational systems worldwide, necessitating emergency remote teaching and coinciding with increased social media use. Such shifts require reconceptualization of learning boundaries in a digital age. This article explores British and American teachers' professional learning spanning social media, place and time. We collected #UKEdchat tweets and #Edchat tweets over 28 months, 1 January 2019-30 April 2021, and identified tweeters who were middle or secondary school teachers in the U.K. and U.S. to interview. From analysis of these data, we report on the tensions, synergies and experiences of boundary-crossing teachers with implications for research and practice.

"Online learning"--learning that involves interactions that are mediated through using digital, typically internet-based, technology--is pervasive, multi-faceted, and evolving, creating opportunities and challenges for educational research in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this special issue, we advance an interdisciplinary agenda for online learning research at the intersection of educational technology, educational psychology, and the learning sciences. In this first article in the issue, we define online learning including its variants, review historical and current contexts, explore its multidimensionality, and assert key issues shaping contemporary online learning. We propose five important lenses: "community," "engagement," "pedagogy," "equity," and "design-based research," through which scholarly communities are creating knowledge that influences research and practice in online learning contexts. These lenses highlight points of conceptual overlap between the online and psychological learning literatures. The special issue is organized around these lenses and includes an article representing each one, complemented by commentaries that offer critical appraisal and synthesis.

Blended learning, which combines online and face-to-face pedagogy, is a fast-growing mode of instruction as universities strive for equitable and alternative pathways to course enrollment, retention, and educational attainment. However, challenges to successfully implementing blended instruction are that "social presence," or students' ability to project their personal characteristics into the learning space, is reduced with potential negative effects on student engagement, persistence, and academic achievement. Instructors are experimenting with robotmediated communication (RMC) to address these challenges. Results from a study of RMC at a large public university suggest that it offers advantages over traditionally used videoconferencing, including affordances for fostering students' embodiment in the classroom, their feelings of belonging and trust, and their ability to contribute ideas in authentic ways.

Information on children's writing in online spaces is scarce. What young writers know or need to know to be effective communicators online can inform elementary writing instruction and technology integration in writing classrooms. This study adds to the nascent research on children's online writing by reporting on the writing processes of eight second-grade children ("tweeters") when composing short-form writing online for their class Twitter account. This multicase study, with data drawn from think-aloud transcripts, video-stimulated recall interview transcripts, and published tweets, suggests that young children's short-form writing includes a motivation to tweet, goal setting, and writing schema knowledge specific to Twitter. On the other hand, children's short-form online writing for Twitter shared attributes with traditional writing typically emphasized in school. We discuss how writing for social media can enhance children's developing writing processes. Implications for elementary writing instruction and social media integration in similar classroom contexts are discussed.

In spring 2020, K-12 schools adopted remote learning amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Using activity theory, the authors examine the educational response to this global health crisis in the United States and the United Kingdom. Data are drawn from key news media publications in each country between 1 February and 31 May 2020. The authors critically examine the tensions and contradictions within and between interrelated systems (schooling, educational policy, home learning). They consider how remote digital pedagogy was perceived and enacted by different stakeholders: teachers, parents, policymakers. Tensions arose between digital pedagogy, system rules and teachers' digital skills, leading to different experiences for students. The division of labour shifted; parental responsibility for managing children's learning increased. Digital equity issues prevailed in both countries (technology access, social support), disadvantaging students from low-income families. National educational policy system responses were more coordinated in the UK than in the US.

Purpose: In a public health crisis where social distancing, or physical distancing while in public spaces, is the new normal, social media offer respite from being alone. Recent statistics show spikes in social media usage worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic. More than just easing loneliness, such freely available digital tools offer affordances for education in an emergency. Design/methodology/approach: This paper summarizes insights from literature reviews of over a decade of research and recent case studies on the benefits of teaching with social media in K-12 education. Findings: The authors highlight three affordances of social media for fostering active learning, community building and civic participation and describe how social media can be used in conjunction with conventional learning management systems. Furthermore, the authors argue that the unprecedented health crisis that is faced today requires the participation of responsible citizens of all ages; K-12 public education is on the front lines of preparing informed and active citizens and the integration of social media as part of remote education plans can help. Practical implications: The paper includes instructional guidelines for K-12 teachers and instructional designers in various settings who seek to integrate social media as part of their strategy for teaching students at a distance and facilitating their civic participation. Originality/value: This paper fulfills an identified need for evidence-based and pragmatic approaches to K-12 online teaching and learning using technologies already widely in use (i.e. social media).

Purpose: As higher education moves to formats that are not face-to-face classes in the wake of a global pandemic, educators need research-based guidelines to inform instructional planning and implementation. This study aims to provide recommendations for teaching with social media, as a complement and enhancement to traditional online teaching approaches. Design/methodology/approach: The study draws on reviews of the research literature and the authors' own experiences in studying and integrating social media into remote teaching and learning in university settings. Findings: Learning environments that blend asynchronous online elements, where students can go at their own pace, on their own time, have some choice over their learning and are regularly and meaningfully engaging with other students, their teacher and the subject matter are most successful for student learning. Social media, with its affordances for personal profiling, relationship-building, content creation and socializing, when thoughtfully integrated into an online education plan, can help students and teachers stay connected while apart, enhance students' engagement and make remote learning seem less remote. Practical implications: The paper includes instructional guidelines for instructors and instructional designers in various post-secondary settings who seek to integrate social media as part of their strategy for remote higher education. Originality/value: This study fulfills an identified need for pragmatic approaches to online higher education using social media.

Students today spend more time writing on social media than they do in formal classrooms and have developed distinct and complex literacies separate from traditional writing curricula. Although several studies have explored teens' informal literacy practices online, research investigating how these spaces may inform or be effectively utilized in the classroom remains inconclusive. This systematic literature review identifies and critically evaluates the existing knowledge base on how social media have been integrated in high school writing instruction, with particular emphasis on which factors improved student learning and which factors created barriers to student learning. Social media platforms were found to be potentially authentic learning spaces, yet sometimes low student participation hindered effective implementation. Specific teaching strategies, such as modeling and scaffolding instruction, and directions for future research are described.

Background and Context: The increasingly widespread use of social media to expand one's social connections is a relatively new but important phenomenon that has implications for teaching, learning, and teachers' professional knowledge and development in the 21st century. Educational research in this area is expanding, but further investigation is necessary to better determine how to best support teachers in their professional development, collaboration, and classroom teaching. Prior literature reviews have focused extensively on higher education settings or particular platforms or platform types (e.g., Facebook, microblogging). This article provides needed insights into K-12 settings and encompasses work from a variety of social media types. We describe a systematic review of more than a decade of educational research from various countries to present the state of the field in K-12 teachers' use of social media for teaching and professional learning across various platforms. Research Questions: To define social media's potentially beneficial roles in teaching and learning, we must first take an in-depth look at teachers' current social media practices. Toward this end, we approached our review with the following research question: How are social media perceived and used by K-12 teachers for their teaching or professional learning, and with what impacts on teachers' practices? Research Design: Guided by Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) established standards for rigor and quality in systematic literature reviews, this article reviews empirical research to examine how social media are perceived and used by K-12 teachers with what impacts on teachers' practices. Findings: We find that social media features offer several benefits for helping teachers fulfill their goals for classroom teaching, including enhancing student engagement, community connections, and teacher-student interactions, but these affordances come with challenges that must be navigated. The literature also suggests that social media features provide benefits for teachers' professional learning within both formal professional development programs and informal learning networks. Conclusions: Implications of this literature review for future research and the design of educational practices are discussed in the final section. Among our conclusions are calls for more data triangulation between teachers' and students' learning and experiences on social media, more attention to teachers' observational behaviors on social media, and further exploration of how social media facilitates interplay between teachers' formal and informal learning.

In a pilot study of an affordable and low-maintenance social media solution for adjunct faculty socialization or onboarding at the community college, interested adjuncts were offered the opportunity to participate in a social media-like experience made possible by the Moodle Social wall format plugin. Though qualitative data did not suggest this opportunity supported three socialization constructs (information, ownership, and connectedness), a small subset of adjunct faculty participants expressed excitement about its potential, describing it as a tool facilitating connectedness and information sharing in related comments. Practical suggestions are noted related to the design and research of social media interventions.

As new technologies shape and are shaped by human practices, educators and researchers must consider the impact that participating in social media--to access, reflect upon, question, evaluate and disseminate scholarship--is having on their professional development and practices. This paper investigates how members of the educational research community use social media to advance professional learning and scholarship dissemination in online-offline networks. Specifically, we examine whether and how participating in the microblogging service, Twitter, as a conference backchannel, facilitated professional learning and participation in the annual meetings of American educational researchers in 2012 and 2016, respectively, and the nature of that participation. Insights from this paper will benefit educators of varying disciplines and experience levels interested in the changing nature of social media in education, scholarship, and professional learning ecologies.

This conceptual exploration revisits a key question from earlier work (Greenhow & Gleason, 2014): What is scholarship reconsidered in the age of social media? "Social scholarship" is a framework that expanded Boyers' (1990) conceptualization of scholarship to consider how social media affect discovery and research, teaching and learning, integration, and application. This paper critically reflects on how social scholarship continues to evolve in light of changing understandings in the field of educational technology and the role social media play in the academy. We provide recent examples of social scholarship such as altmetrics, interdisciplinary projects, crowdsourced educational technology syllabi and reconsideration of the needs of research participants. Moreover, we share concrete examples of how scholars might enact social scholarship, with what benefits and challenges, and surface new concerns regarding openness, equity, access, literacy, privacy and ethical considerations. Our paper concludes with recommendations for preparing scholars to enact social scholarship while mitigating the challenges it poses.

This paper discusses access and use of information and communication technologies among urban high school students from low-income families, a topic of great interest to teacher educators, educational policymakers, and others concerned with digital literacy instruction. Recent reports from national digital learning initiatives have portrayed today's teens as digital natives--youth who are constantly online, perceive themselves as Internet-savvy, and prefer technology-enhanced learning experiences. However, this portrait may not be true for all learners. This study investigated trends in Internet use among students from low-income families compared to national trends. In the spring of 2007, students from low-income families responded to a survey assessing their access to the Internet, frequency and type of use, and capacity to use the Internet. The researchers also conducted focus groups with students. In this paper, we discuss findings and implications for teachers seeking to understand similar students' Internet access, use, and capacity and suggest implications for digital literacy instruction, technology policy, and teacher education. (Contains 2 tables and 3 footnotes.)

This study compared the abilities of inservice and preservice teachers to demonstrate an understanding of technology integration and to apply such knowledge to instructional decision-making. Using a set of online content-specific multimedia scenarios to resolve complex problems of teaching with technology in a simulated school environment, inservice teachers outperformed preservice teachers on criteria measuring practical and pedagogical content knowledge about technology integration; however, preservice and inservice teachers scored similarly in their ability to make an instructional decision about technology. In addition, both preservice and inservice teachers demonstrated a lack of weighing competing options in the case and a lack of orientation toward reflective and adjustable practices. Overall, inservice teachers demonstrated consideration of a broader range of classroom- and school-level factors in making a technology integration decision. Understanding, capturing, and measuring these differences is essential to advance theory on the dimensions of technological pedagogical content knowledge, and how it develops in different teacher sub-groups to advance the work of teacher educators concerned with designing courses about technology integration appropriate to learners' needs. (Contains 4 tables.)

Online delivery methods offer much promise for anytime, anywhere adult learning. As a method of outreach, and to provide support for just-in-time learning, teacher educators are increasingly deciding to design Web sites that are online, resource-based learning environments for teachers and preservice teachers. Automated evaluation tools and data collection methods can help such Web site designers develop and use online, resource-based learning environments to meet their goals of providing high quality learning opportunities for teachers. This article presents a three-pronged approach for evaluating issues of pedagogical design and user-centered functionality in online, resource-based Web sites. Checklist, Web site traffic analysis, and talk aloud protocols are each described and then illustrated through their application to a site aimed at educating teachers about technology integration. We discuss the relevance for developing effective learning environments when teacher educators apply this evaluation approach to resource-based learning environments. (Contains 1 table and 3 footnotes.)