It should not be a surprise to anyone that our teens always stay connected. According to the Pew Research Center, 83% of adults in the United States have some type of cellular device, be it a smart phone or a traditional cell phone. As an educator, I contend that the number of teens with cell phones is not much less. In fact, parents often buy their children cell phones so that they can be in constant contact.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the amount of time teens are spending online is increasing rapidly.

Today, 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week).  And because they spend so much of that time ‘media multitasking’ (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) worth of media content into those 7½ hours.

In other words, teens are spending more hours staying connected than there parents are spending at work each week.

One trend that I have personally noticed among students this year is the proliferation of twitter amongst their peer groups. As recently as last year, it was common for students to say things like, “I don’t like twitter. It’s boring. I use facebook.”

Boy have things changed. Twitter is quickly becoming the new facebook for our youth. They crave the constant feedback that a service like twitter provides.

This should really come as no surprise. As late as last year, MSNBC reported that teens were sending approximately 3, 339 text messages each month.

In the mind of a teen, twitter is the ultimate group text messaging service. They post what they once would via text to a friend, but with twitter they send it out to a mass audience and receive instant feedback in the form of replies or retweets.

As most of us know, schools have traditionally been the last to jump on the new bandwagon. Not only do they typically not embrace new technologies, they often attempt to impede their usage. Most still try hard to confiscate cell phones and are still fighting the battle to not let students wear hats in school. Now that’s a silly and antiquated rule.

It is my contention that schools should be embracing these various platforms of social media and utilizing them, at least for communication purposes.

With so many of our youth on sites like facebook and twitter, why not use these tools to communicate with our students concerning announcements, reminders of games, or information on the upcoming school play? So many teens have smart phones that this would be a much more effective means to communicate such information than by simply reading the school announcements every morning.

I believe wholeheartedly that it is time for schools to move into the 21st century and prepare our students for the tools and technologies that they must master to be successful in this new world.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic. Please leave a comment.

Next post…how to use social media as a tool in the classroom.

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