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?

I received an email from the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education about a free online conference that they are holding over the next three days about changing how we “do” conferences that takes into account Web 2.0 technologies. Find out more about this free online conference here.

When I visited the Ning homepage for this online conference, I discovered a video of Kevin Burden and Simon Atkinson about the value of traditional conferences and what we might want to move to. Enjoy…I did!