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?

The company I work for wrapped a cool new social networking application around our LMS this school year. There are teams of people who seeded the site with cool content for kids. The students have taken to it like the proverbial duck to water. When I first logged in to change my password, there it was – taunting me: “Click here to upload your profile picture.”
Uh-oh. I always dread this part of setting up a profile. For those of you who have yet had the pleasure of meeting me, let’s just say that I’ve “let myself go” for the past, oh, 12 to 15 years. I don’t consider myself to be a vain person, but I am somewhat sensitive about my weight. It’s not healthy, I don’t like it and I don’t like the way I look – particularly in photographs.
So I resorted to what a lot of people have – creating an avatar image of myself instead for my profile pic. I used the Simpsonize Me website. That was sufficiently geeky I think (thanks, Mr. Moses!).
But when I went to EduCon 2.1, I was able to recognize people I never met before in person, all because they had actual “normal” profile picture online (usually Twitter). That is when it hit me – regardless of what I think of myself, others may (gasp) actually want to talk to me when we are in the same physical space.
So I set up the ol’ Logitech webcam, combed my hair, and start snapping away. After more than a few shots, I think I’ve come up with one that represents me well and fairly.
What about you? Do you post your “real” picture? If so, why? If not, why not?