Impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on teacher tweeting in Spain: needs, interests, and emotional implications

Abstract

The dissemination of Covid-19 imposed the confinement of a large part of the world's population. For this reason, face-to-face classes in Spain were interrupted and did not resume until September 2021. The situation forced schools to move both teaching and communication between teachers to a digital environment, which favoured greater use of social networks. This paper conducts an exploratory study of 30751 tweets extracted from eight educational hashtags (#eduhora, #claustrovirtual, #SerProfeMola, #otraeducaciónesposible, #claustrotuitero, #profesquemolan, #orgullodocente, and #soymaestro) used by the educational community of teachers in Spain. A semantic content analysis is carried out using a mixed methodology based on public data mining and sentiment analysis. The analysis of the data provided novel information about the needs, interests and concerns, as well as the emotional implications that teachers expressed on the social network Twitter during the transition to virtual teaching. The lock-in situation was associated with increased emotional content in the tweets analysed in the sample, irrespective of the positive, negative or neutral polarity of the tweets. The results also show that teachers in Spain use social networks both for professional development and emotional support and that this trend has increased after Covid-19. The use of Twitter is linked to continuous professional development in times of particular difficulty, also in Spain, as has been the case in other countries. The findings of the study show that the historical Twitter archive is a valid resource for the analysis of teachers' feelings in longitudinal research including the Covid-19 period.