How Old Do I Feel!!

Did you know that the Internet has only been around since 1990?  Not to long, but to our students it has been here forever. These fact were included in the 2009 Pew Internet and American Life Project:

• Today 93% of teens use the Internet and 9% of online teens use their browsers to cloud computing activities
• The first blogs were written in 1997; today, 30% of teens keep a blog and 54% read them
• E-mail is 22 years old and 87% of teens use it.

Even more relevant for education, Pew Internet reports that in 2009, nearly 75% of teens have created content for the Internet; 39% have shared their own creations online; 26% keep a personal Web page; approximately 25% have created or worked on Web pages or blogs for others, including those for groups or school assignments; and 20% remix content they find online to crete their own artistic creations.
 If teens are doing this in their spare time as...recreation, we need to leverage this willingness, interest and passion and direct it towards learning.

John Palfrey, a Harvard University law professor , summed this up in a quote for a 2009 Associated press article:  "From the standpoint of young people, there's no real distinction between online life and offline life....it's just life."
Makes you kind of go mmmmmmm.