Had an interesting situation today. I was at a local all girls school and was faced with a class of year 12 students so i thought i'd do a bit of research! I asked the girls if they used a range of web 2.0 tools, thinking that i could use their answers to throw at teachers to prove they needed to catch up with the times. I was not going to score on that one based on today's results!!!
these girls didn't know about: wikis, skype, or twitter. there was a vague recognition of blogs, but no one used them. They didn't use facebook. But...Bebo was the flavour of the month. Almost all of them used it. Apparently"it's more appropriate (than facebook) for our age group." Well i certainly won't be using them as an example to rattle the cages of those teachers who refuse to use computers! But if this is typical of their age group (and i'm suspicious about their typicality) then perhaps i need to have a bit of a hard look at what i am expecting teachers to be doing. Definitely calls for more research, but it sounds like this generation is quite fixed in their ways and not exploring the potential of the web. I'd be interested in hearing if this is common in other places or groups of kids.