Social Media as a Strategic Tool in School Management: Experience of

Ukraine and USA

Liubov A. Kartashova

1 a

, Nataliia O. Prykhodkina

1 b

, Tetiana A. Makhynia

1 c

Hanna M. Tymoshko

1,2 d

, Olena A. Sholokh

2 e

and Feliks M. Zhuravlev

University of Educational Management, 52A Sichovykh Striltsiv Str., Kyiv, 04053, Ukraine

T. H. Shevchenko National University “Chernihiv Collegium”, 53 Hetman Polubotka Str., Chernihiv, 14000, Ukraine

State University of Economics and Technology, 5 Stepana Tilhy Str., Kryvyi Rih, 50006, Ukraine

Keywords:

Social Media, School Management, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), School Leaders, Management

of the Educational Institution, Certiﬁcation Training.

Abstract:

The article presents the results of the analysis of using of social media in school management in Ukraine and

United States of America. Social media is broadly deﬁned as a lot of relatively inexpensive and widely avail-

able electronic instruments that allow any person to publish and receive information, collaborate and build

relationships with other people. The authors of the article break up social media into social networks, blogs,

content hosting. There are some constructive conclusions made in the article. The educational opportunities of

social media among Ukrainian specialists are very underestimated. The value of social media as an instrument

of the educational process is undeservedly belittled. Many educators treat them with neglect and skepticism,

considering social media exclusively as an entertaining resource. Using of social media for educational pur-

poses is perceived by American students, teachers, researchers as self-evident and inalienable function. The

American didactic experience reveals that social media can be successfully used to arrange the work of the

teaching staff and students, hold individual and collective consultations enhancing intellectual and creative

potential of students. The data reports “Global Guide 2020”, “90 days that changed K-12 teaching & learn-

ing: strengthening the bonds of communications”, “2019 Social Media Trends in Education Report”, “Digital

learning during the pandemic: Emerging Evidence of an Education Transformation” and the Ukrainian State

Education Quality Service for 2020 are analyzed in the article. The authors had a content analysis on the

massive open online courses (MOOC) by the Ukrainian platforms EdEra, Prometheus and VUM online and

the English ones such as edX, Udemy, FutureLearn, XuetangX and Coursera, whose self-study contributes to

the readiness for the effective using of social media in school management.

1 INTRODUCTION

The modern period of development of school man-

agement is characterized by the active and compre-

hensive implementation of information and commu-

nication technologies. The main goal of their imple-

mentation is the improving the quality of training and

the interaction of all participants in the educational

process.

The social media grows in popularity all over the

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1270-4158

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6211-5546

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4065-0465

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0996-6138

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5258-8086

world. According to a new research by GlobalWe-

bIndex (www.gwi.com, 2021), people expend a third

of their network time in social media. Comscore data

also shows that percentage of time spent on social me-

dia and messengers accounts for more than a quarter

of time spent on their mobile devices.

Social media is growing rapidly and becoming a

social force with a life of its own, offering us the im-

mediacy and availability of information and data and

the immediacy of people, conversing and working to-

gether in areas of common interest.

1.1 Related Works

Kaplan and Haenlein (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010)

gave a deﬁnition to social media as “a group of In-

196

Kartashova, L., Prykhodkina, N., Makhynia, T., Tymoshko, H., Sholokh, O. and Zhuravlev, F.

Social Media as a Strategic Tool in School Management: Experience of Ukraine and USA.

DOI: 10.5220/0010922400003364

In Proceedings of the 1st Symposium on Advances in Educational Technology (AET 2020) - Volume 1, pages 196-210

ISBN: 978-989-758-558-6

ternet applications basing on the ideological and tech-

nological foundations of Web 2.0 that allow to create

and share user content”. Web 2.0 is a tendency to

develop websites on the similar principles stemming

from the focus on the project and service socializa-

tion, its improvement by users (O’Reilly, 2005). So-

cial media is fundamentally different from traditional

types of media by implementing a bidirectional infor-

mation transfer strategy meaning “many sources and

many recipients” (Scott, 2017). Traditional media, in

its turn, uses a unidirectional strategy meaning one

source and many recipients.

There is no generally accepted deﬁnition of the

term “social media”. In our opinion, the most concise,

simple and relevant deﬁnition of this phenomenon is:

“Social media is broadly deﬁned as a lot of relatively

inexpensive and widely available electronic instru-

ments that allow any person to publish and receive

information, collaborate and build relationships with

other people” (Education World, 2012).

Social media is an online communication in

Thornley (Thornley, 2008) terms with express un-

derstanding that a person can smoothly and ﬂexibly

change their role, to appear either as an audience or

participant. Social software is used for this purpose

which makes it possible anyone (without speciﬁc cod-

ing expertise) to post, comment, move, edit informa-

tion, create communities on their interests.

Stephens (Stephens, 2011) deﬁnes social media as

“forms of communication either Internet or text-based

that support social interactions of individuals”.

Azhnyuk (Azhnyuk, 2012) deﬁnes social media as

an online service intended for the mass distribution of

user-generated content, wherein anyone could be an

author as opposed to traditional media wherein au-

thors are pre-selected and limited audience.

Some researchers consider the concepts of “social

media” and “social network” as synonymous. How-

ever, we feel that this is incorrect. We are on board

with the statement of Scott (Scott, 2017) that “social

media is a superset and social network is a subset”.

Thus, social networks are just a speciﬁc instance of

social media albeit the most popular one.

Azhnyuk (Azhnyuk, 2012) breaks up social media

into 3 categories: 1) social networks; 2) blogs (includ-

ing standalone, blog hosting, microblogging, etc.);

3) content hosting (photo services like Instagram and

Flickr, video hosting services like YouTube, hosting

for slides, documents, music like Slideshare, Scribd,

Soundloud, etc.). However, he notes that online me-

dia intended for personal contact or group communi-

cation, rather than for mass publication should not be

relegated to social media, in particular, e-mail, mes-

sengers, online games.

Zhdanova (Zhdanova, 2019) identiﬁes 7 types of

social media:

1. Social networks are online services that prompt

you to make new acquaintances and form inter-

est communities. A user has an online proﬁle

and several ways to interact with others (through

groups, events, polls, games, etc.) on such sites.

Facebook and LinkedIn are the most famous ex-

amples of social networks.

2. Messengers are online messaging services where

users interact through personal correspondence.

Messenger applications are available on mobile

devices such as Telegram, Viber, WhatsApp.

3. Social bookmarking sites help users save and

share interesting information as a link to other re-

sources. For example, the Pinterest network al-

lows you to store a large number of images in dif-

ferent categories in order to facilitate the search

later.

4. Blogsand forums offer comments to many users at

the same time. Medium, Blogger and WordPress

are well-known blogging platforms.

5. Microblogging lets you send short updates (140

characters) to everybody subscribed to such up-

dates. The most outstanding microblogging, Twit-

ter, has gained a lot of attention among journalists,

as it allows you to quickly track developments and

get information on what’s happening on the spot.

6. Social news services allow users to create or pub-

lish links to news from other sources. The main

element is voting, the community chooses this

way which news will become the most important

and visible to the rest of the users. The most fa-

mous example is Reddit.

7. Multimedia hosting is services possessing most of

the social network peculiarities (user proﬁle, cir-

cle of friends, opportunities to ditribute and com-

ment on information), but it is primarily focused

on the ability to download video, photo and audio

ﬁles. Examples include YouTube, Vimeo, Flikr.

1.2 Social Media in Educational

Management

One key task of the educational management is to en-

sure the development of the educational institution as

an independent organization through establishing in-

teraction with all participants of the educational pro-

cess, partnership with public organizations and sup-

port of local business. Relationship networks take a

position of one effective interaction model for all par-

ticipants of the educational process. Skills of active

Social Media as a Strategic Tool in School Management: Experience of Ukraine and USA

197

communication through social networks are currently

necessary for everyone. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube

and other networks have moved beyond a framework

of face-to-face interaction and it is powerful com-

munication platforms facilitating both to build your

brand and be a virtual representation for government,

business, and public organizations.

Unlike the ofﬁcial websites of general secondary

educational institutions requiring training in a more

professional way for updating information and estab-

lishing feedback, the pages of institutions in social

media have their own characteristics determined by

the properties of electronic communication as prompt

dissemination of information, accessibility, simpliﬁed

search the target audience, ease of the feedback set up

and so forth. It has own structure, organizational and

technological parameters affecting the nature of social

connections and being an element of the constructing

mechanism for the communicative space within mod-

ern society, performing several functions while creat-

ing a value basis of its existence.

Primbs (Primbs, 2016) identiﬁes key needs for

users in social media:

• managing relationships from Facebook dating as a

replacement for exchanging visiting cards to close

contacts in the family or community of friends;

• managing information by ﬁltering news and rel-

evant information based on user preferences

through friends and subscriptions;

• managing one’s identity by forming a personal

brand.

For the foregoing reasons a follower of the web-

site of the educational institution or school principal

having independently joined a school community on

social media is in position to:

• establish contacts between the participants of the

educational process and to terminate communica-

tion without explanations at any moment;

• set up constant access to information on news of

the educational institution activity due to the oper-

ational aspects of search algorithms of social me-

dia;

• develop own attitude to certain events in the ed-

ucational ﬁeld relying upon an opinion of the ex-

perts of the ultimate educational brands. It means

that actual attitude of the experts to a particular

educational institution and a vision for the further

developments is relevant for the followers rather

than the information in itself under the context of

big data on educational reforms reported by thou-

sands of sources.

Thus, for the head of an educational institution,

the presence on the social network personally or

through the institution’s page allows to promptly in-

form the participants of the educational process with

the life of the organization, purposefully manage the

ﬂows of various information, inﬂuence their con-

sciousness and worldview transforming parents from

“readers/observers” to active coexperiencers/fans or

vice versa, however, awareness ensures that the neg-

ative developments of individual autonomy are re-

duced.

Returning to the (Primbs, 2016), the role of fans

should be emphasized: “Real fans are much more

than mere readers/listeners/viewers/target group, fans

interact. Fans are ready to do something for the ob-

ject of their worship. Fans are the ﬁrst to submit pho-

tos when you are announcing a photo contest. Fans

write the ﬁrst comments under your posts breaking

the ice. Fans cut trolls down to size excusing from a

nasty work. Fans will also stand with you when you

get a shitstorm. They provide entertainment for reg-

ular visitors of your community. And they give you

stuff you can work with again”.

The communication efﬁciency on the network is

manifested by a high level of trust within the network,

as opposed to distrust of external persons; existence

of a unifying ideology/religion/lifestyle that allows to

act together; targeted message delivery, which make

possible it to be received precisely by the person who

really needs it, as opposed to communication with a

mass but passive audience in the case of traditional

media (Pocheptsov, 2012). These are mechanisms for

the group functioning that ensure the integration of

individual actions in joint group activity and commu-

nication.

One of the crucial components of the management

process in an educational institution is to inform par-

ticipants of the educational process and communities

on its activity in open public resources (Bobrovskyy

et al., 2019).

2 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

The pedagogical research under consideration has

been carried out as part of the research work “Train-

ing of competitive specialists in the context of educa-

tional changes” (RK 0117U002378) to be conducted

in 2017-2021 by the Department of Pedagogy, Ad-

ministration and Social Work of the Educational and

Scientiﬁc Institute of Management and Psychology of

the University of Educational Management of the Na-

tional Academy of Educational Sciences of Ukraine.

The aim of the article is the comparative analysis

AET 2020 - Symposium on Advances in Educational Technology

198

of features of using of social media in school man-

agement: experience of Ukraine and United States of

America.

We monitored 120 sites of Ukrainian middle

schools and 123 sites of American schools (several

sites from each state).

The monitoring parameters are:

• which social media do principals use in managing

of the schools, teams of teachers and students?

• what are the purposes of using social media?

Also we monitored the pages of Ukrainian and

U.S. principals in social networks.

We conducted a survey of 138 school principals of

Ukraine. The key survey questions were:

• do you have a personal page in social networks?

• does your school have its own page in social net-

works?

• what social networks do you use in your manage-

rial activities?

• are there any barriers to school communication in

social networks?

• which information in social networks is the most

interesting for participants of the educational pro-

cess?

We had a content analysis on the massive open

online courses (MOOC) by the Ukrainian platforms

EdEra, Prometheus and VUM online and the En-

glish ones such as edX, Udemy, FutureLearn, Xue-

tangX and Coursera, whose self-study contributes to

the readiness for the effective using of social media in

school management.

We have also used the online survey results of 3,9

thousand principals of general secondary educational

institutions, educators, parents and the students from

9–11 grades on the distance learning in schools of

Ukraine that was conducted by the State Education

Inspectorate of Ukraine in the period from April 8 to

15, 2020.

For comparison we took the results of a survey of

American school principals from the report at the of-

ﬁcial website of U.S. Department of Education “So-

cial media in school emergency management: Using

new media technology to improve emergency man-

agement communications” (Stephens, 2011), the re-

port of Pew Research Center “Social networking fact

sheet” (Pew Research Center, 2018), reports “Global

Guide 2020” (EducationUSA, 2020), “90 days that

changed K-12 teaching & learning: strengthening

the bonds of communications” (tomorrow.org, 2020),

“2019 Social Media Trends in Education Report”

(classintercom.com, 2019).

3 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Using social media, the schools can:

• quickly respond to the needs of the audience:

hear the parent, student and the public commu-

nity (highlight the main topics for discussion, get

feedback);

• prevent conﬂicts due to operational coverage of

problems in the activities of the school;

• through social networks learn more about the ac-

tivities of other schools and build own strategy for

activities in social networks;

• ﬁll vacancies and provide the school with highly

qualiﬁed personnel by searching for personnel in

social networks. For example, the group “Jobs for

educators” on Facebook. The goal is to post mes-

sages about available vacancies in schools and for

teachers which ﬁnd work.

In the school social media are primarily an ex-

ternal communication tool. For large schools with a

large number of participants in the educational pro-

cess, social media can be a tool for interaction be-

tween participants in the educational process among

themselves (for example, quickly obtain the necessary

information and provide mutual assistance). The so-

cial media allow to the teaching staff, and especially

to the director, to quickly resolve issues related to the

adaptation and rotation of personnel.

We obtained the following experimental results

(table 1).

Most principals avoid committing to the pro-

fessional use of social media because it’s com-

pletely overwhelming. Between Instagram, Twitter,

YouTube, and Facebook etc., it is hard to know what

will yield the best results. It’s important to consider

the best social media for purposes.

Every principal tries to choose the best way to

promote wonderful school community. For learning

and interacting, the American principals of middle

schools use Twitter. It is the gold standard for them.

For documenting and sharing the cool work happen-

ing in school, Instagram and YouTube are the best

and most popular tools. Flickr is useful for sharing

pictures. American principals of middle schools use

Facebook for calendar reminders and getting the word

out quickly about calendar changes and events plan-

ning.

For example, the school principal Eric Sheninger,

2013 American “Best Director Award” winner, best-

selling author of “Digital Leadership: Changing

Paradigms for Changing Times” (Sheninger, 2014),

allowed his teachers to submit their daily reports us-

ing blog. Sheninger’s blog was viewed by 6,500 peo-

Social Media as a Strategic Tool in School Management: Experience of Ukraine and USA

199

Table 1: The results of monitoring of the use by school principals of social media in school management (2019 year).

Social media The results of monitoring of Ukraine The results of monitoring of the USA

Facebook 96 % 98 %

Instagram 33 % 87 %

Twitter 1 % 99 %

Telegram 10 % -

WhatsApp 4 % 76 %

Viber 36 % 11 %

Youtube 25 % 84 %

Linkedln - 28 %

Google Blogger 5 % 87 %

Google+ 5 % 89 %

Pinterest 7 % 56 %

Skype 12 % 42 %

Flickr - 63 %

ple worldwide and over 600 are constantly following

the life of the principal and his school in September

2019. It is interesting that it was an incentive not

only to report to the administration on their work for

teachers, but also to share with others the experience

they have gained by introducing gadgets into teach-

ing, as well as the success stories achieved by the stu-

dents in these lessons. The topics of blog posts be-

gan gradually to expand, teachers shared the system

of grades in school, their rubrics, how they interact

with children outside of school, how the use of gad-

gets improves academic performance, and so on. A

new perspective on education and blog creation has

transformed the lives of teachers and students. Firstly,

the US government purchased the latest equipment at

the school Eric Sheninger writes proudly about on his

blog (Sheninger, 2014). Secondly, teachers from all

over the world came to the school in New Jersey to

learn about the experience. In addition, the virtual re-

ality company provided a program that allowed New

Milford school students and their teachers to attend

virtual space meetings where children could ask ques-

tions, and virtual training courses were provided.

The principal of Renner Elementary School

Teresa Tulipana embraces the social media as a com-

munication tool. Facebook and Twitter accounts keep

families abreast of school events and happenings. She

envisioned them as systems to provide calendar re-

minders. She thinks the Facebook is also a great

tool for sharing our school’s academic and behav-

ioral focus areas in an efﬁcient, fun and engaging

manner. Recently a kindergarten teacher posted an

Animoto highlighting pictures from Writer’s Work-

shop, which communicated the importance of writing

at our school. When the fourth grade completed Fa-

mous Missourian research projects, these were posted

so parents were able to understand the value and im-

Table 2: Comparative analysis of the goals of using social

media in school management in the USA and Ukraine (2019

year).

The goals of using social

media in school manage-

ment

The

purpose

rating of

Ukraine

The

purpose

rating of

the USA

Simpliﬁed search for the tar-

get audience allowing to ex-

pand personal and profes-

sional contacts between par-

ticipants of the educational

process

1 (90 %) 3 (87 %)

Demonstration of educa-

tional measures

2 (70 %) 4 (85 %)

Public disclosure of suc-

cesses of students, teachers

and school classes

3 (62 %) 1 (99 %)

Public disclosure of urgent

announcement

4 (57 %) 2 (98 %)

Demonstration of various

forms of training

5 (49 %) 6 (76 %)

Project and competition re-

porting where both students

and teachers can participate

6 (43 %) 7 (62 %)

Clariﬁcation on the issues

of the educational process

(school enrollment, standard-

ized external testing, state ﬁ-

nal examination, etc.)

7 (41 %) 8 (39 %)

Explanation of educational

reforms and innovations

8 (33 %) 9 (11 %)

Challenges of participants of

educational process consol-

idation concerning engage-

ment in socially important

projects

9 (17 %) 5 (81 %)

AET 2020 - Symposium on Advances in Educational Technology

200

portance of their research. Social media has also al-

lowed to deploy important professional development

content in Renner Elementary School. Recently they

used Blackboard, an educational social media tool, to

host a virtual faculty meeting. Through Blackboard,

staff watched a short Rick Wormeli video on deﬁning

mastery, and then responded to reﬂection questions

on a discussion board. This ﬂexible format allowed

staff members to learn at a time that was convenient

to their own personal calendars and increased engage-

ment by assuring that every voice was heard (Educa-

tion World, 2012).

The principal of Tomahawk Creek Middle School

says that the teachers of her school utilize social me-

dia whenever they can. They currently have a Face-

book page for school and PTA. She have found that

this was a great way to get messages out to parents

and students. There are several teachers who use Ed-

modo to post discussions and assignments for their

students, and they have reported remarkable success

using this tool. For example, one teacher had 25 kids

on Edmodo the day he started using it. They are look-

ing at implementing a Twitter account next year to

help get information out to the community. Although

this is not a replacement for standard means of com-

munication (Web sites, letters home, etc.), it is a great

additional way to share information with community.

As far as discipline issues go, they attempt to address

those who cause the issues. The technology is here to

stay, so they try to implement it where they can and

deal with the trouble issues when they arise. Thus

far, they have had no problems using these means of

communication (Education World, 2012).

Principal of South Side Elementary School in

Bristol, Connecticut, David Huber thinks that Twitter

is more than just a social media platform. It’s also a

professional learning resource, a tool to communicate

with students’ families, and a way showcase student

achievements (Friedman, 2019).

One area of the social network usage being actu-

ally the origin for its popularity in Ukraine was the

involvement to solve socially important issues of par-

ticipants of the educational process. In particular,

Facebook has been used to inform, mobilize and raise

funds for volunteers during the Revolution of Dignity

since November 2013. Therefore, the school admin-

istration resorts to this tool in order to continue this

work to assist and support the ATO warriors and re-

port on the done work. In addition, content analy-

sis of the pages of the administration and teachers of

educational institutions of Ukraine shows the effec-

tiveness of similar charitable work in collecting assis-

tance among participants in the educational process

supporting socially disadvantaged sections of the pop-

ulation or volunteers as orphanages, elderly people,

rural libraries, hospitals, etc.

In addition to it, not only prompt information but

also targeted support directly to the participants of the

educational process are provided through the Face-

book network and messengers, among which Viber

is the most popular for the management of the educa-

tional institution. It is about involving a large num-

ber of indifferent people to help the participants of

the educational process who were in an emergency

like ﬁre, accident, surgical treatment, etc. Such as-

sistance massively reduces fraud and disillusionment

with charities through direct personal contacts.

Another example of the social networks usage

in the school management is the establishment of

successful cooperation and communication between

educational institutions of municipal ownership and

its public within the framework of project activi-

ties aimed at repairing or arranging the territory and

premises of educational institutions, as well as build-

out of a creative, development or inclusive environ-

ment. The key to the success of such projects is the

proper organization of its advertising on social net-

works by the author of the project, in particular, the

administration of the educational institution, as well

as high activity of participants in the educational pro-

cess to support projects in social networks. 663 ed-

ucational projects have particularly won according to

the results of the “Public Budget 2020” project out of

1564 projects in 13 categories having passed the stage

of planning and implementation in Kyiv that, which is

42 % of all projects (gb.kyivcity.gov.ua, 2019).

Nevertheless, social networks are equally threat-

ening. The freedom of the information distribution

through social networks and communities regardless

of its content and quality particularly transforms the

virtual Internet space into a risk zone for the spiritual

and moral sphere of the individual shifting classical

values and developing a new virtual culture.

An interesting transformation was occurred to

Facebook community “Parents SOS” founded in June

2014 due to the initiative “talk on the social network”

in order to discuss problems related to education, as-

sistance to parents in the case of mistreatment of their

children in school or kindergarten and initiate sys-

temic changes in education.

The community works according to a simple plan:

1) the situation is announced (at school or in educa-

tion in general);

2) it is discovered how this situation complies with

the law;

3) the conclusion what should be changed whether

the situation or the legislation, and they change it

together.

Social Media as a Strategic Tool in School Management: Experience of Ukraine and USA

201

Despite the fact that the public organization initi-

ated many changes in the education system through

civic initiatives during the its existence, its members

often resorted to systematic violation of netiquette, re-

sorting to rude, obscene, evaluative expressions and

personal affront in the beginning. Instead of solving

a problem, sometimes it was possible to be sunk in

the information rain of value judgments supporting a

particular message have not received a solution to the

problem in the real world.

It should be noted that the group’s administrators

are currently working hard to address these shortcom-

ings, as evidenced by the article’s content analysis of

the group’s 2019 publications. In particular, publica-

tions are increasingly focusing on situations of suc-

cess as systemic changes, concrete victories over bu-

reaucracy in education and extortion; legal clariﬁca-

tion of the rights and freedoms of participants in the

educational process; clear algorithms for solving the

most common educational problems for all partici-

pants.

So we have determined grounding on our analysis

that the following types of social media are the most

popular for USA and Ukrainian school:

1. Blogs.

A blog is a 21st century newsletter. Blogs pro-

vide a two-way interaction and allow the school

administration to integrate multimedia content in

order to make the school popular. There is no bet-

ter way to share strategies, ideas and success sto-

ries. Teaching blogs are no less popular, with the

help of which teachers can effectively manage the

independent extracurricular work of students, as

well as create tasks aimed at improving the skills

of speech activity. Learning different types of let-

ters (search, viewing, familiarization and study-

ing) is facilitated by the unlimited ability to post

links in any quantity to materials different from

each other. Also, blogs are in no way inferior in

the possibility of acquiring speaking and listening

skills. This happens through the use of podcasts,

through educational texts of radio programs, and

videos that are freely available on the Internet. In-

tegration of all the listed training methods into a

blog allows you to listen to ﬁles repeatedly, and if

necessary, stop and revise ﬁles. American Schools

use Google Blogger, Wordpress, Edutopia (San

Rafael, California), FreeTech4Teachers (Maine),

Rubicon (Portland, Oregon), Hands On As We

Grow (Iowa), Class Tech Tips Blog (New Jer-

sey), The Applicious Teacher (Orlando, Florida),

Teaching Heart Blog (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)

and other platforms. For example, Eric Sheninger

in addition to his ofﬁcial blog as Principal of New

Milford (Sheninger, 2021), has created a profes-

sional blog to tell the story of the digital transfor-

mation of the school and learn from others inter-

ested in digital leadership.

There are a number of impressive blogs by heads

of schools in Ukraine on the Internet, the number

of which is impressive. In particular, the Google

request “blog of a school principal” represents 19

million search results. However, it should be un-

derstood that the use of blogs in the management

of general secondary education is often due to ex-

ternal circumstances as a requirement for certiﬁ-

cation. For this reason, the Internet is full of blogs

formally created with the glut of popular articles,

elements of plagiarism or unstructured content.

Quality content could only be seen by those exec-

utives who are passionate about this type of work

and update the materials systematically. However,

interviews with more than 400 education execu-

tives show that blogs in Ukraine are currently an

outdated tool and can be completely replaced by

social networks. Therefore, a mere 5 % of heads

of our online respondents use blogs in their man-

agement activities.

2. Digital photo sharing.

Photos can quickly depict and share student work,

improvements and achievements. American and

Ukrainian school principals and teachers take pic-

tures of student projects and then post it on Insta-

gram. American teachers also use Pics4Learning

during classroom observations. They share pho-

tos with other accounts such as Twitter from their

Instagram account.

3. Video platform.

Creating a YouTube, TeacherTube, SchoolTube

channels or Vine account for school allows you to

record and share educational and social processes.

Teachers and administration of American schools

share live events such as school concerts in real

time using such tools like Ustream, ClassVR etc.

In Ukraine the principals use YouTube.

4. Twitter.

Twitter, the best-known free microblogging appli-

cation, is particularly useful for fast exchanges of

thoughts, ideas, and information. American sci-

entists were among the ﬁrst users of the social

network Twitter. During the ﬁrst years of exis-

tence, it was dominated by reports of scientiﬁc

conferences, symposiums, research citations, etc.

140-character tweets are a dynamic combination

of text, images, videos, and website links. Hav-

ing created a hashtag for the school you could

share a conversation with related parties with the

AET 2020 - Symposium on Advances in Educational Technology

202

ability to search for any problematic topic iden-

tiﬁed through Twitter. At the beginning of each

school year American school leaders send par-

ents a letter describing, how to create a Twitter

account and to set up options for receiving text

messages. Ability to receive Twitter updates on

its own terms makes it unlike any traditional com-

munication tool (Scott, 2017).

5. Facebook.

World famous resource Facebook has emerged as

an academic social network. Initially the website

was available only for students at Harvard Univer-

sity. Then registration was opened to other uni-

versities in Boston, and later for students of all

educational institutions in the USA. All the above

tools could be integrated or published on the Face-

book page (Thornley, 2008). It is the favorite so-

cial media among Ukrainian and American school

principals and teachers.

It is impossible to create and maintain conﬁdence

in the operation of the institution being a mandatory.

It is impossible to create requirement for effective ed-

ucational activities without prompt and complete in-

formation. That is why the administration should or-

ganize the activity of the educational institution under

the conditions of information openness and communi-

cation with the participants of the educational process

and the community.

Information transparency is ensured by the avail-

ability of educational facilities including social net-

works Information transparency in the educational in-

stitution to inform the participants of the educational

process. The educational institution decides itself

what to inform of and how to do it additionally. The

primary principle of information distribution is to re-

port important data for parents who are the most con-

cerned and critical audience.

It is for the purpose of enabling local educa-

tional managers to communicate quickly, correctly

and clearly, not to be afraid of criticism and be able

to turn to crisis situations, an online course “Effective

Communications for Educational Managers” has been

developed by the public organization “Smart Educa-

tion” powered by the EdEra online platform (EdEra,

2019) and viewed by 4,400 people during 10 months

of 2019.

In order to be successful communicators in the

modern information space, its developers offer:

• be persistent and consistent in sending a message,

ideas and facts, the audience will be grateful for

accurate navigation in the chaos of educational in-

formation;

• repeat the message many times in different for-

mats through interviews, events, photos, info-

graphic, etc aiming to be heard;

• know what bothers and what interests your audi-

ences, and build your business and communica-

tion against this background;

• always keep efforts and resources on the mission

of the institution;

• focus on the simplicity and clearness of messages;

• have unique inspirational stories;

• get your audiences as close as possible.

Much attention is paid to anti-crisis communica-

tions, which goal is to immediately and ﬁrmly aban-

don attempts concealing any unpredictable or even

unpleasant event in the educational institution. The

overall penetration of modern communications into

the public life makes it absolutely impossible to con-

ceal any information. One of the primary principles

of public communication should be remembered: a

person ﬁrst reported the event largely determines the

further development of its media coverage.

The unpredictable event message should consist

of three required components answering the following

questions:

• “what happened?” – provide full information on

the event, immediately blocking or at least sub-

stantially reducing the possibility of misinforma-

tion on it;

• “what are we doing?” – the school demonstrates

its proactive stance in addressing the problem,

what has been taken to remedy the problem, who

have been further involved and informed;

• “what to expect?” – an uncomfortable state of un-

certainty is removed or at least signiﬁcantly re-

duced for the person, the most probable develop-

ments are shown.

Lastly you should always report how the problem

is resolved. Given that, you also should be frank, and

if the problem cannot be ﬁnally resolved for some

reason at the school level, then it should be obliga-

tory revealed and reported on further steps to resolve

it (Kobernik and Krasnova, 2019).

Since information distribution and communica-

tion are grounded on the processes of dissemination

and exchange of information, it is important to know

how these processes are implemented and how they

can be effectively organized. Building quality infor-

mation distribution by the head to the participants of

the educational process and the community can con-

tribute in many ways to improving the level of media

literacy of the administration and teaching staff of the

institution.

Social Media as a Strategic Tool in School Management: Experience of Ukraine and USA

203

The characteristic of social networks particularly

has the underside in the rapid and prompt dissemina-

tion of information. A prime example is sharing of

“innocent” fakes at the request of the school admin-

istration with good intention of preventing the con-

sequences of participation in the games “Blue Cat”,

“Run or Die”, “Momo”, “Candy” and a new game

“Bounce!” through social networks by parents. Low

media literacy of participants of the educational pro-

cess, lack of ability to recognize the signs of fake

news, poor orientation of critical perception of infor-

mation contributes to the testing parents of various

technologies of measuring the status of the audience

and channels of information dissemination on social

networks.

Information security should start with every par-

ticipant in the educational process, especially with the

school administration, and it should become a daily

habit for us not to become the object of fake dis-

semination, a tool for the introduction of dirty tech-

nologies, a convenient toy in the game of manipu-

lators. Such results are summed up in their posts

by Ukrainian media educators Inna Ivanova (review

of the “Candy” fakes, September 2018) and Svitlana

Izbash (review of the “Bounce!” fakes, February

2020) hereby preventing parents from “advertising”

such games.

The school principal should also consider other

types of danger that students may encounter using any

network and that should be taken into account in the

institution policy:

• content (access to information not intended for

children of appropriate age);

• behavior (offering actions that could endanger

child safety, fraud);

• dangerous contacts (chatting, ﬁle sharing, mes-

sengers).

In order to avoid such risks, a school principal

should develop his own policy on the safe use of the

Internet, which provides:

• content ﬁlters;

• availability of antivirus programs and its timely

updating;

• use of Internet resources during training sessions

under the teacher control;

• monitoring the page on social networks with re-

spect to placing unauthorized information on it;

• providing educators and students with training on

safe use of the Internet and development of end-

to-end information and digital competence;

• online culture enhancement of the communication

participants of the educational process;

• preservation of personal data of participants of the

educational process (Bobrovskyy et al., 2019).

4 CHALLENGES THAT SCHOOL

LEADERS FACED DURING THE

PANDEMIC

School leaders’ roles have been unexpectedly and dra-

matically changed by the COVID-19 crisis. The un-

precedented nature of this situation means there is no

set direction for them to follow. School leaders are

like actors in a play where the story, the script and cos-

tumes have all changed mid-performance, and they

are on stage improvising to adjust to their new role

(Sampat and Oommen, 2020).

The forced mass introduction of distance learn-

ing technologies during the pandemic (Polhun et al.,

2021) has exacerbated the issue of using of social me-

dia in school management.

In the period from April 8 to 15, 2020, the State

Education Quality Service of Ukraine conducted an

anonymous online survey of 3.9 thousand school prin-

cipals, 43.4 thousand teachers, 120.5 thousand par-

ents and 44.1 thousand students of 9-11th grades

(sqe.gov.ua, 2020).

From the point of view of our research, we were

interested in the results of a survey of principals,

who make up more than 25% of school principals

in Ukraine. 49.95% of them work in rural areas,

41.98% – in cities and 8.07% – in urban settlements.

Most parents and students in grades 9–11 who par-

ticipated in the survey conﬁrmed that for the period of

quarantine there is distance learning in all subjects of

the invariant component:

• 102,380 parents (85%);

• 36,425 students (83%).

The directors of general secondary educational in-

stitutions also assured that 97% of educational insti-

tutions for the period of quarantine teach students us-

ing distance learning technologies. The preference for

distance learning is divided in half:

• 55% of surveyed students (24,087 people) and

50% of parents (60,569 people) were positive;

• 45% of students (20,001 people) and 48% of par-

ents (57,858 people) gave a negative response.

After completing the quarantine, 41% of the sur-

veyed teachers (17,872 people) indicated their desire

to use distance learning technologies, including social

media, and 54% (23,397 people) would use them par-

tially. Only 5% of teachers (2,096 people) stated that

AET 2020 - Symposium on Advances in Educational Technology

204

they would not turn to distance learning technologies

in the future.

The results of the survey of principals also con-

ﬁrmed that almost 96.9% of general secondary edu-

cational institutions (GSEI) during the quarantine pe-

riod students are taught using distance learning tech-

nologies. The majority of leaders (75.9%) noted that

the entire teaching staff was involved. However, in

almost 20.1% of schools, distance learning is pro-

vided only by teachers who are provided with com-

puter equipment and Internet access. At the same

time, 3.12% of the surveyed (GSEI) leaders stated that

their school did not switch to remote work mode.

Under quarantine, educational institutions use dif-

ferent modes of distance learning, programs and dig-

ital services. GSEI leaders noted that online learn-

ing is mainly used for distance work. The most

effective are services with the ability to assess the

level of assimilation of the material – they are used

by 44.88%, without the possibility of evaluation –

20.27%. Asynchronous learning with the ability to

assess the level of assimilation of the material is car-

ried out by 20.55% of GSEI.

According to the report, the issue of establishing

effective interaction with participants in the educa-

tional process is identiﬁed as one of the most difﬁcult

in the implementation of distance learning along with

technical support, methodological training and orga-

nizational issues (Pavlik and McIntosh, 2016).

As noted in the “Global Guide 2020”, in the USA

Facebook, Instagram, and Linkedln are the dominant

social media platforms for education, where available.

Twitter and YouTube are also popular social platforms

for education. There were used virtual meeting plat-

forms such as Zoom and Google Meet to expand and

enhance outreach (EducationUSA, 2020).

We analysed the results of Project Tomorrow, an

education nonproﬁt that runs the on-going Speak Up

Research Project (Evans, 2020). The latest data gives

responses from 110,467 K-12 students, 11,731 teach-

ers and librarians, 1,128 school and district level ad-

ministrators, 11,749 parents and 1,532 community

members collected between March 16 2020 and June

30, 2020 (tomorrow.org, 2020).

The situation in which schools found themselves

in connection with the pandemic, opened new oppor-

tunities for more students to regularly communicate

with their teachers using email. Email communica-

tions with teachers and students in middle school, for

example, increased 33% during school closures: The

percentage of students in grades 3–5 who regularly

email their teachers also increased from 8% to 16%.

Over three-quarters of students in grades 6–12 (77%)

report that personal emails are now a standard mode

of communications with their teachers. Students are

reporting that this new communications avenue pro-

vided more efﬁcient and effective ways for them to get

feedback from their teachers and to help them solve

learning challenges with just-in-time support.

The new environment has also accelerated the

adoption of text messaging between students and

teachers as a communications modality. In 2015, only

14% of teachers said that they were using texting to

communicate with students. Though teachers regu-

larly report using text messages and other forms of

social media to communicate with colleagues (57%)

and even parents (28%), their adoption of this tool to

communicate directly with students, either individu-

ally or as a class, has not increased in the past ﬁve

years.

Relative to teacher communications, middle

school students are united in their preference for three

types of digital tools, personal emails (56%), text

messages (55%) and auto phone messages (49%).

The sudden shift to digital learning as a result of

the pandemic-induced school closures required many

school and district leaders to think differently about

the purpose of school, new modalities for instruction,

and how to effectively harness a wide range of digital

tools to support learning continuity. In some cases,

administrators relaxed district rules about the use of

personal devices, mobile apps and social media ac-

counts to help facilitate efﬁciency and effectiveness

in this unprecedented time. For example, while most

districts did not encourage teachers to text message

with students prior to the school closures, the use of

texting increased signiﬁcantly during the school clo-

sure period as both students and teachers (as well as

parents) found the usage to be highly effective. Given

both the value of those enhanced communications

channels, and the continued uncertainty in school for-

mats during pandemic, it is most likely that more dig-

ital tools, even including new social media platforms,

will emerge to support student-teacher communica-

tions.

District technology leaders (54%) say they under-

stand the importance of putting in place safeguards

to protect student data when instituting a new digital

initiative or adopting new technologies to support in-

struction. However, only 17% of school districts are

currently using a risk dashboard to identify students

in trouble or in need of adult intervention based upon

their communications messages over the school net-

work.

This issue of communications over the school or

district network versus a student or teacher using a

personal smartphone and their own data plan to trans-

mit messages is also an important consideration. Ef-

Social Media as a Strategic Tool in School Management: Experience of Ukraine and USA

205

ﬁciency of communications was a chief concern dur-

ing the school closures, and thus as documented many

students and teachers gravitated easily to their own

personal accounts to help facilitate those interactions.

However, 52% of district technology leaders say they

encourage teachers and students not to mix personal

and school accounts and applications in their commu-

nications.

The school principals say that they would like new

teachers to learn how to effectively leverage social

media tools for student engagement and communica-

tions within their teacher preparation programs. With

a new mindset about the value of technology to sup-

port enhanced student-teacher communications, the

opportunity for effectively leveraging new tools in the

classroom, whether that is an online classroom facili-

tated through Google or the physics lab on the second

ﬂoor, appears promising.

For the dissemination of school information

American school principals use such social media:

58% – Instagram, 58% – YouTube videos, 53% –

Snapchat, 58% – Twitter, 47% – Text messages (to-

morrow.org, 2020).

In another survey “2019 Social Media Trends in

Education Report” (classintercom.com, 2019) devel-

oped by Class Intercom we observe that 95% of

schools use social media to communicate during the

pandemic. 85% of schools report using photos to

share the virtual, in-person, and hybrid learning tak-

ing place. Another 79% use video to share what

is happening in their schools and district. 37% of

schools are allowing students to contribute to their so-

cial content. 40% of districts have up to 10 users with

administrator access to social accounts. Nearly 20%

of schools are investing in paid social.

But school and district leaders need to be cog-

nizant of protecting student data and student safety

when using these new online tools for communica-

tions, with peers and teachers. Additionally, as these

tools become more pervasive, districts will want to

fully understand their legal obligations in terms of re-

taining messages and their responsibility and account-

ability for staff usage of these tools.

5 WAYS TO PREPARE SCHOOL

LEADERS FOR USING OF

SOCIAL MEDIA IN SCHOOL

MANAGEMENT IN A

PANDEMIC

According to a survey conducted by the State Edu-

cation Inspectorate of Ukraine, the lack of support

and understanding of the situation from parents is rec-

ognized as a problem by 28.2% of respondents from

3.9 thousand school principals (Pavlik and McIntosh,

2016).

The things that can contribute to this:

1. Professional training of school leaders in the

master’s degree “Management of the educa-

tional institution” and “Educational Adminis-

tration”

Training of future managers of educational insti-

tutions is carried out according to the educational-

professional program “Management of educational

institution” specialty 073 “Management” in the ﬁeld

of knowledge 07 “Management and Administration”,

approved by the Academic Council of the University

of Educational Management of the NAES of Ukraine

taking into account the Standard of Higher Educa-

tion for the second (master’s) level of higher educa-

tion(MON, 2019).

The purpose of this program is to train new gener-

ation of education managers who are able to identify

and solve complex specialized problems and practical

problems in the management of educational institu-

tions, their units, subsystems to meet the educational

needs of the state, society, educational institutions and

students.

Normative content of training of higher educa-

tion, formulated in terms of learning outcomes in

higher education in the ﬁeld 073 “Management” for

the second (master’s) level of higher education spec-

iﬁed in the disciplines of general training and free

choice of curriculum for candidates educational pro-

gram “Management of educational institution” of the

second (master’s) level of higher education (MON,

2019).

In the context of our study, the educational pro-

gram provides for the acquisition of general compe-

tencies, including: the ability to think abstractly, ana-

lyze, synthesize and establish relationships between

phenomena and processes (general competence 1);

ability to communicate with representatives of vari-

ous professional groups and in the international con-

text (general competence 3); skills of using informa-

tion and communication technologies for search, pro-

cessing, analysis of information from various sources

and decision making (general competence 4) and ac-

quisition of professional (special-professional) com-

petencies of the specialty (professional competence

6), including the ability to create and organize ef-

fective communications in the management process)

(Makhynia, 2018).

In the United States, future school principals are

trained in the Master in Educational Administration

program, because in order to become a high school

AET 2020 - Symposium on Advances in Educational Technology

206

principal, you must have a master’s degree in school

administration and become certiﬁed as a school ad-

ministrator or principal. In the learning process, fu-

ture education managers trains educators to become

school principals and administrators, with a focus on

serving diverse educational communities and foster-

ing student achievement (thebestschools.org, 2021).

A school administrator or principal must be certi-

ﬁed. For example, The Principals’ Training Center

for Practicing and Aspiring Principals in International

Schools offers a course “Technology Leadership”, in

the process of studying which students should know

how does a principal juggle the demands of digi-

tal communication, social media and digital environ-

ments in a school setting, how can digital tools and

environments be utilized to create sustainable and vi-

brant learning communities etc (thebestschools.org,

2021).

2. Introduction of school principals with the top-

ics and opportunities of massive open online

courses (MOOC)

The opportunity to study at a convenient time, free

access to the latest information, teaching materials,

modern technologies and practical cases, the oppor-

tunity to learn from the best universities and teachers

in the world have led to the widespread popularity of

the MOOC among its students.

Among the proposed MOOC, we have selected

courses in three areas, which, in our opinion, con-

tribute to the readiness of school principals in the

United States and Ukraine to using social media in

school management. These include media literacy

and critical thinking; cybersecurity and establishing

effective online communications.

Critical thinking and the educational process built

on its foundations have become the basis of educa-

tional reforms in the world’s leading countries over

the last 10 years (Abdula et al., 2020; Konoval et al.,

2021; Prykhodkina, 2020). The World Economic Fo-

rum in Davos regularly lists the relevant skills needed

for a successful career. In recent years, critical think-

ing has risen in the ranking of these skills from the 4th

place (skills for 2015) to the 2nd place (skills that will

be important in 2020). The ability to think critically

ensures scientiﬁc, technological and social progress

and is the key to democracy, and education plays a

key role in its development. Critical thinking pro-

vides independent and responsible action, as well as

self-improvement (table 3).

Information and its timely access provides the

maximum competitive advantages. However, it is

equally important to be able to protect this informa-

tion. Our MOOC content analysis showed a number

of courses aimed at learning exactly how and why a

person can be attacked in the information space, as

well as how to improve their own information secu-

rity, which will further develop an effective program

to protect personal information resources (table 4).

During the pandemic conditions, the issues of fast

and consistent information reporting about the pecu-

liarities of the educational process by means of vari-

ous media became especially relevant. The principals

have to be ready to convey information accurately, to

focus on the main thing, to focus on the simplicity and

accessibility of messages through those social media

that are most adequate to the audience. A number of

MOOCs are dedicated to this topic (table 5).

3. Certiﬁcation training of school principals ac-

cording to the relevant programs

In particular, a number of media literacy training

programs developed by the Academy of Ukrainian

Press are actively implemented by the Institutes

of Professional Development of Teachers, including

school principals (www.aup.com.ua, 2020).

In addition, 11 special courses for training school

principals at working in the digital society, aimed at

establishing effective online and Cybersecurity com-

munications, have been developed since the begin-

ning of the pandemic by the Ukrainian Open Univer-

sity of Postgraduate Education (uvu.org.ua, 2020).

Duration of such courses 1 ECTS credit / 30 hours.

Based on the results of the training, a certiﬁcate is is-

sued under the license of the University of Education

Management.

In the United States, Media Management and

Leadership is offered in higher education institutions.

The course is designed for 3 ECTS credits (90 hours).

This course aims to give students a survey of some

of the latest management and leadership theories, in-

cluding those encouraging a new sense of social re-

sponsibility. It also gives students the opportunity to

apply these theories to a number of different compet-

itive, structural, motivational, strategic, and organi-

zational issues in the media world, by writing origi-

nal case studies and solving problems in existing case

studies (The New School, 2020).

6 CONCLUSIONS

So, in 2019 the educational opportunities of social

media among Ukrainian specialists are very underes-

timated. The value of social media as an instrument

of the educational process is undeservedly belittled.

Many educators treat them with neglect and skepti-

cism, considering social media exclusively as an en-

tertaining resource. Using of social media for edu-

cational purposes is perceived by American students,

Social Media as a Strategic Tool in School Management: Experience of Ukraine and USA

207

Table 3: MOOC, represented at English and Ukrainian platforms, aimed at developing media literacy and critical thinking for

school principals.

The results of monitoring of Ukraine The results of monitoring of the USA

(1) “Critical Thinking for Educators” on the plat-

form Prometheus

(1) Media LIT: Overcoming Information Overload

(Arizona State University) on edX

(2)“Educational tools of critical thinking” on the

platform Prometheus

(2) Sorting Truth From Fiction: Civic Online Rea-

soning (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) on

edX

(3) “The science of everyday thinking” on the plat-

form Prometheus

(3) Making Sense of News (University of Hong

Kong) on edX

(4) “English for media literacy” on the platform

Prometheus

(4) Fake News, Facts, and Alternative Facts (The

University of Michigan) on edX

(5)“Media literacy” on the platform Prometheus (5) Fake News (Davidson College) on edX

(6) “Media literacy: practical skills” on the plat-

form Prometheus

(6) Critical Thinking: Fundamentals of Good Rea-

soning (IsraelX) on edX

(7) “Factcheck: trust-check” on the platform EdEra (7) Problem Solving and Critical Thinking Skills

(Fullbridge) on edX

(8) “Internet Veriﬁcation” by VUM online (8) Global Media, War, and Technology (The Uni-

versity of Queensland) on edX

(9) “Media Literacy for Citizens” from IREX in

partnership with the Academy of Ukrainian Press

and StopFake

(9) Understanding Media: Introduction to Media

Literacy and Representation (The University of

Newcastle Australia) on FutureLearn

(10) “News Literacy” by Media Detector (10) Disinformation, Misinformation, and Fake

News Teach-Out (University of Michigan) on Fu-

tureLearn

(11) “Very Veriﬁed: an online media literacy

course” on the platform EdEra

(11) Developing Literacy: A Journey from Still

Image to Film (Into Film) on FutureLearn

(12) Making Sense of Data in the Media (The Uni-

versity of Shefﬁeld) on FutureLearn

(13) Making Sense of the News: News Literacy

Lessons for Digital Citizens by Coursera

Table 4: MOOC, represented on English and Ukrainian platforms, aimed at the development of Cybersecurity for school

principals.

The results of monitoring of Ukraine The results of monitoring of the USA

(1) “Digital Security and Online Communications”

by VUM online

(1) Introduction to Cybersecurity (University of

Washington) on edX

(2) ”Information security in the digital world” by

VUM online

(2) Information Security – Introduction to Informa-

tion Security (New York University) on edX

(3) ”Media literacy for educators” by Prometheus (3) Introduction to Cyber Security (The Open Uni-

versity)

teachers, researchers as self-evident and inalienable

function. The American didactic experience reveals

that social media can be successfully used to arrange

the work of the teaching staff and students, hold in-

dividual and collective consultations enhancing intel-

lectual and creative potential of students.

In 2020, the pandemic became a catalyst for rapid

change in the use of social media in educational pro-

cess at schools. Heads of education in Ukraine and in

the United States almost simultaneously found them-

selves in the same conditions: the management of

secondary education, the organization of training, the

transfer of educational content using online educa-

tional platforms, social media. We analyzed the data

reports “Global Guide 2020”, “90 days that changed

K-12 teaching & learning: strengthening the bonds

of communications”, “2019 Social Media Trends in

Education Report”, “Digital learning during the pan-

demic: Emerging Evidence of an Education Trans-

formation” and the Ukrainian State Education Qual-

ity Service for 2020. The results showed that in

Ukraine as well as in the United States, social me-

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208

Table 5: MOOC, represented on English and Ukrainian platforms, aimed at establishing effective online communication

among school principals.

The results of monitoring of Ukraine The results of monitoring of the USA

(1) “Communication tools for reputation building”

by Prometheus

(1) From Digital Technologies to Social Media

(Curtin University) on edX

(2) “Digital communications in the global space”

by Prometheus

(2) Understanding Media: Introduction to Media

Literacy and Representation (The University of

Newcastle Australia) on FutureLearn

(3) “How to understand social networks. Course

for journalists” by VUM online

(3) Developing Literacy: A Journey from Still Im-

age to Film (Into Film) on FutureLearn

(4)“Effective communications for educational

managers” by EdEra

(4) Respecting Our Differences Online (Samsung)

on FutureLearn

(5) “Media literacy for educators” by Prometheus (5) Smart Media Communication by XuetangX

(6) Ethical Social Media by COURSERA

dia became the most important communication tool

during the pandemic. In the United States, there is

a greater variety of types of social media for use in

school education. The reason is that the United States

is a leading country in the ﬁeld of digitalization of

the economy and the creation of innovative learning

technologies. But the most popular social media in

school management is Instagram, YouTube videos,

Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Text messages (What-

sApp).

As our research shows, despite a wide range of

available technologies, the United States is experienc-

ing signiﬁcant difﬁculties in organizing online educa-

tion. In order to teach how to build effective com-

munications for education managers, how to develop

their media literacy, critical thinking, and knowledge

in the ﬁeld of cybersecurity, a lot of massive online

courses have been created in the United States (edX,

Udemy, FutureLearn, XuetangX platforms). With

the support of international organizations (UNICEF,

IREX, DW) such courses have also been created in

Ukraine (platforms EdEra, Prometheus, VUM on-

line).

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