USING HASHTAGS AS A TEACHING RESOURCE IN HIGHER EDUCATION

In recent years, social networks have been gradually incorporated into the educational landscape, becoming formative educational resources that integrate the teaching-learning processes. In addition, they constitute powerful tools for permanent lifelong education, which may ensure the autonomous use by students outside of the classroom. In this regard, much evidence exists which demonstrates that students have a positive attitude towards its academic use, fostering their involvement and knowledge. Among the most popular social networks in use Twitter can be singled out, as it is currently having the greatest impact on the world of education due to its large size and ease of use. In this submission we show the usefulness of hashtags in the field of higher education via an experiment carried out during the course "Information Technology and Communication applied to Education", taught in the first year of the Degree in Elementary Education at the University of Burgos. Eighty-three Elementary Education degree students took part in this trial and all used Twitter as an educational tool. Profiles were individually created by them and, simultaneously, a subject hashtag was generated: #PRIMUBU15. Over the course of the subject students' tweeted diverse content related to information and communication technology for education using the hashtag created. At the same time, an educational radio project was developed, creating a new hashtag called #RadioEdUBU. This was used as a channel for the distribution of their projects, the progress made at the time and the results obtained. Once the experiment was finalised, and with a view to understanding the usage and development of hashtags, various monitoring tools were employed: TAGS (Twitter Archiving Google Spread sheet), TweetReach and Tweet Binder. All these tools were used in their free version, affirming their importance and significance while reflecting the evolution of these training processes. Finally, we can conclude that students were satisfied with their experience, which was demonstrated by their massive involvement in the subject through the use of hashtags as a teaching resource.