21stcenturyed.com

Check out the date of my last blog post: March 24, 2010.
That was almost five months ago.

To be honest, blogging fell near the bottom of my list of priorities when – in March – I learned that I needed to have major surgery for the second time (the first was almost 10 years ago). When someone tells you they’re going to open your chest and stop your heart for a few hours, things like blogging tend to fall off the radar.

I’m happy to say that I am fully recovered and doing well, thank you. I’m back at work and just getting my digital life back on its feet. Facebook was my friend during my recovery period. The short spurts of information with a network primarily made up of my friends provided a ready path to update others and to receive their positive thoughts and prayers.

So – back to the blog. I hope you’ll follow along and be patient with me while I try a few things (e.g. experimenting with new themes, re-tagging my posts, etc.). I’m going to attempt to be a bit more prolific with my posts. I just have to work on the internal editor that keeps telling me “that’s not important enough to blog about”.

I hope you’ll come back often, follow the blog on via RSS and look me up on Twitter and Facebook – just click the icons to the left.

I have a lot to learn from you, and hope you feel the same.

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?