Pew on Social Media and Young Adults

Pew Internet and American Life Project released its report yesterday on Social Media and Young Adults. Telephone survey data confirmed what we are observing and hearing from students. Amongst the key findings:

"Blogging has declined in popularity among both teens and young adults since 2006. Blog commenting has also dropped among teens."

"Both teen and adult use of social networking sites has risen significantly, yet there are shifts and some drops in the proportion of teens using several social networking site features."

"Teens are not using Twitter in large numbers."

"Cell phone ownership is nearly ubiquitous among teens and young adults."

For more details and the full report, click here.

Establishing a Personal Learning Network

This may be the most important post of the year which I have made to this blog:

Announcing: The Edublog Awards 2009

The nominations are up and voting is now open in the 2009 Edublog Awards.

The Edublog Awards pulls together lists of excellent blogs / sites.

These lists give you a one-stop shopping place for influential folks to follow online and are a great way of discovering hidden treasures and cool ideas on how these different social media tools can be used in an Educational context. I plan on sifting through many of these bloggers and tweeters to see who I am missing.

And, please vote if for someone if they have been mentoring you online. It's payback time. Time to get started....take the time to peruse and vote. I guarantee that you'll be glad you did.

New Blog Software Designed with Educators in Mind

With input from Will Richardson, this blog software makes it easy to register students and does not require email addresses. It's called 21 Classes, and has already been reviewed by Steve Dembo on his blog Teach42.

Steve is impressed with the options that allow you to arrange students into groups, create sets of authors, and change a few settings including policies and terms of use statements. Even though themes are limited, there are options for adding cool widgets.

Steve writes, "I do have to admit that this is probably the most well developed blog engine for educators." You may want start reading Teach42 which is a very active blog done by a fellow NICE member who has willingly shared his expertise.

Dembo commented that he is a New Trier Grad, class of '92.

Keeping up with Technology

I agree with Jenny Levine's latest post Keeping Up When You Don't Have the Time about the value of reading blogs to stay abreast of all that's happening in the tech world even if you're not "a techie". Jenny Levine's presentation at ISLMA was terrific; she author of The Shifted Librarian blog, a site that helps librarians understand the impact of ubiquitous, always-on Internet on our the library profession. If you set up an account with Bloglines, you simply check it once a week or so to track all the blogs you subscribe to. I generally don't have time during the school day for this; I generally catch up on the weekends and then it's easier to concentrate and read at a leisurely pace. I like ResourceShelf and the reports found at the Pew Research Center which are not devoted exclusively to schools or librarian work. Levine also recommends The SirsiDynix Institute Blog. I checked out Word to the Wise, a list of library technology words to help you stay up to date on the latest technology buzzwords surrounding the library industry. Sign up to receive a new Word to the Wise in your e-mail inbox every week. You can also Subscribe to the SirsiDynix Institute podcast feed and receive automatic downloads of the audio portion of each Institute seminar (in mp3 format). The archives are also full of informational programs in pdf format and podcast which can educate you about web 2.0, mashups, social bookmarking, Firefox, gaming and more.

K-12 Library Blogs

Here is a list of K-12 library blogs. Some have student contributors who post book reviews; others are managed only by librarians.