Familiarity and Usage of Social Media Technology: An Exploratory Study of Teachers in Ghana

The growth of social media sites has been a phenomenon in the last few years. However, not much is known about how teachers have embraced the technology as the phenomenon is virtually unexplored in the extant literature in Ghana. The research therefore explored this issue by examining familiarity and usage of social media technology among teachers in Ghana. Teachers in Ghana were randomly selected from ten schools and pretested questionnaires were randomly administered to them. The empirical evidence suggested that majority of the teachers were familiar with social media technology and are using one or more of these social media sites. They access the social media sites through their smart phone as a preferred mode of internet device. The most familiar social media sites which emerged were Facebook [99%], Wiki [99%], followed by YouTube [98.5], Instagram [91.4%], Web-blogs [87.8%], Slideshare [84%] and LinkedIn [76.1%]. However, Facebook and YouTube are the most used media sites among the teachers with 96.4% and 93.9% respectively. They spend over 22hours a week on the sites for several purposes including personal and professional development. In spite of the increasing usage, over 76% of the teachers have not integrated it for instructional purpose in the classroom although few of them occasionally share academic and useful information to their students. Some of the reasons which were given for not using the tools for instructional purpose include, fear of privacy violation, not part of curriculum, cyber abuse, distraction of students’ studies and infrastructural problems among others.