Social Media Use in and for School: A Transnational Perspective

Using the qualitative data from two international projects that studied children's internet use - namely EU Kids Online and Net Children Go Mobile - this paper will address the following question: to what extent children (aged 9-16) use social media in and for school. Whilst previous studies focus on a specific situation of use assessing the efficiency of using social technologies for a certain purpose, the current paper relies only on the general usage of social media spontaneously reported by children during the individual and group interviews. The results look positively at a first glance, the data showing that children do use SM for school in an informative, communicative and, more rarely, in a creative way. Nevertheless, at a deeper analysis one has to remain sceptical about the topic, as it is rather about using of social media applications and not social media ethos (Lankshear & Knobel, 2008) as long as children are not so prone to creating and publicly sharing their content or in participating in an massive collaborative project, but rather rest at peer to peer collaboration replicating and prolonging in SM the offline peer circle.