Social Media

Social media, used responsibly, can give important encouragement and ideas from peers
To give the quality of support needed to develop and sustain a young teacher's career, other things are also needed - school based support and professional associations. It's all about having a range of options.
An important port of call for a young teacher should be to find someone on staff who can give them direct 'hands on' support, and another should be to reach out to the wider teaching community through professional associations, which savvy teachers have been doing for decades. Join an association here.
Once joined, an association can provide social media networking contacts and 'face to face' professional development that can tap into the collective wisdom of many experienced professionals, help in a particular subject area or connect with the latest research.
Many teachers find that this gives them more quality direction, has more chance of leading to successful classroom practice and eventually leads to more satisfaction in their career.
A president of one of our associations is only in her 20's and she leads others through after school meetings and workshops, because as a young professional, she wants to support other young teachers of Japanese and gain knowledge and skills out of it herself. Her association has a Facebook forum which backs up their 'face to face' meetings and workshops, but would never replace them.
Young teachers can go to the Council of Education Associations (CEASA) website: www.ceasa.asn.au and explore the 'Associations' tab to find out more about South Australia's 55 professional teacher associations or the 'Educators' tab to find out about over 85 professional learning events, run by associations, occurring between January and July 2012 alone.

News article: Social Media Can Help Young Teachers Cope - Dec 29 2011

By Sheradyn Holderhead, Education Editor from the Advertiser

TEACHERS can benefit from using social media to express issues and receive feedback, research shows. See the full article form the Advertiser here with a comment from CEASA Executive Director, Phil Callen