Interests and feelings of Spanish teachers on twitter during Covid-19

Abstract

The diffusion of Covid-19 imposed the confinement of the entire Spanish population between March and June 2020. An exploratory study of the evolution of teachers’ interests and feelings in social networks is carried out. For this purpose, three key periods have been differentiated: pre-pandemic (January 2018-February 2020), confinement and state of alarm (March 2020-May 2021), and post-pandemic (June 2021-March 2022). We analyzed 9462 tweets from faculty communities on Twitter using public data mining, sentiment analysis, and semantic content analysis. The results highlight a significant increase in teacher interventions on Twitter and an increase in emotional content during the confinement in both positive and negative sentiments, closely related to the use of emojis. During the pandemic period, new topics of interest appeared related to the evolution of COVID-19 in Spain and the safety of the return to the classroom. Topics dealing with digital tools and innovative methodologies appeared with different relevance in all the periods analyzed.