Investigating Social Media Potential for Supporting Teachers' Digital Games Literacy

This study examines how social media resources on YouTube, Twitch, and Twitter address teachers' digital game literacy, a domain where teachers have often learned informally and independently because formal professional development is scarce. Its central aim is to test whether these resources map onto the five literacy areas of the Games Literacy for Teacher Education (GLTE) framework. The authors gathered 150 multimedia resources from 2021 and 2022 using multilingual search terms and qualitative coding, drawing on contributions from 30 stakeholder groups, chiefly in the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Germany.

The resources were organized into eight topic categories, with Design for digital game-based learning (instructional design) the most prevalent, followed by Game Use. The findings show that the resources address GLTE literacy areas at least partially, but not comprehensively. Themes such as Games in Society, Health and Safety, and Community fall outside the framework's explicit scope, indicating a broader social and cultural dimension of game literacy that existing models do not fully capture.

On this basis, the authors argue that teacher game literacy should be conceptualized more broadly, incorporating games as youth culture and as a social practice, and they propose an updated model grounded in a critical, social-cultural perspective. The study is explicitly a non-exhaustive snapshot relying on descriptive coding, so its conclusions point toward a conceptual reorientation and future research rather than generalizable measurement. Its reference base draws on literature on game-based learning, digital and game literacy frameworks, teacher professional learning networks, and educational live-streaming.