21stcenturyed.com

A survey of K-12 educators’ was recently released by edWeb.net, MCH and MMS Education. The stated goal was:

“To benchmark attitudes, perceptions and utilization of social networking websites and content-sharing tools by teachers, principals and school librarians.” (p. 2)

The starting population was huge – well over 60,000 teacher, principals and library/media specialists. Unfortunately the response rate was really low – 1.55% (I’ll never again complain when I get 20%). I also wonder (since this information is not provided) whether K-6 was over-represented as such a high number of female respondents might indicate.

Much of the findings are what you might expect – the teachers see that this technology is valuable and that their students are using it. They feel overwhelmed and a bit behind the curve on it all. They want more training on these types of technologies.

One finding of the study jumped out at me. While 85% of the respondents have joined a social networking site joined Facebook, 76% of those educators state that their usage is “seldom or never”. So why are these folks signing up and seldom (or never) returning? Do they not understand the premise of a “social network”? Do they simply feel overwhelmed by the tools themselves? Or do they simply lack the time to spend in these activities?

Do you belong to a site that you are not participating in? If so, why aren’t you showing up to add to the discussion?