Each year, I give a survey to my sixth graders about their use of technology and social media as one entry point into a unit we call Digital Life. I also share the compiled results back with families, too, so they have a sense of trends with technology.
Here are the results of this year’s survey:
A few observations:
- The amount of time that kids spend on technology is certainly continuing to grow over time, moving pretty solidly into the two/three/more hours a day. This echoes the results of a lot of official surveys of this age group.
- More and more of my students have Smart Phone, meaning parents are spending a lot of money not just for the phones, but also for the services.
- Facebook has seen another sharp decline among my sixth graders while Instagram grows at a steady rate for this age group.
- Snapchat continues to be popular and growing.
- Fewer students say they have had negative experiences in online spaces than in years past, and this reflects a trend in my surveys. Good news there.
- More and more students indicate that parents and teachers have had explicit discussions with them about using technology. Another piece of good news.
This is a small sample, of a narrow population group, but for me, I find it valuable as a way to talk about their footprints in the digital world, and what it all means — both in positive terms (connections, sharing, creating) and negative terms (harassment, bullying, privacy). It’s all about the balance.
Peace (in the numbers),
Kevin
Kevin. Thanks for sharing this. Would be great if middle school teachers all over the country were doing the same survey,and the results were aggregated into a national response. If that were happening I’d be asking for the data to be mapped, showing responses from different parts of the country.
Did you see the Digital Divide video I posted in this concept map? http://tinyurl.com/TMI-DigitalDivide-Issues
Where does your school place on availability of technology and connectivity along with teacher preparation to use the technology?