As educators continue to reflect on President-elect Barack Obama's historic victory in the Nov. 4 election, many are looking at the Obama campaign's unprecedented use of technology to mobilize support and wondering what lessons their schools and colleges might learn from his success.

Observers have credited Obama's success in no small part to his campaign's innovative use of technology--including blogging, text messaging, and online social networks--to connect with younger voters and get them excited about politics and the election.

"We've done a huge amount of organizing using the internet, and we've used new technology in ways that really captured young voters' attention," Obama spokeswoman Kirsten Searer told the Associated Press (AP) for a Nov. 3 story.

Obama's Facebook page had 2.6 million supporters, and he had 850,000 MySpace friends. The campaign also relied on text messages to communicate with voters, finding that short blurbs were an effective way to advertise campaign stops and early voting locations.

Exit polls had the youth turnout, voters between the ages of 18 and 29, at its highest since 1972--and 66 percent of these young voters cast their votes for Obama.

Young voters reportedly accounted for 18 percent of the 133 million votes cast. This occurred in a year when a Pew Research Center poll found that nearly half of Americans between 18 and 29 used the internet as their major source of election news in 2008. Only 17 percent of youth voters said they got their election coverage from newspapers.

Obama even mentioned the impact of young voters in his Nov. 4 victory speech, thanking "the young people who rejected the myth of their generation's apathy."

Many observers believe educators can look to the Obama campaign for inspiration and use similar techniques in mobilizing support within their own school communities.

"There are a lot of lessons [schools] can learn," said Nora Carr, chief communications officer for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina, "especially [regarding] social media networks. [These] can be used for teacher recruiting ... and there are ways for teachers to communicate with students."

Carr said some school systems use online social networking to communicate with college students and recent graduates as a way to recruit teachers. She also said introducing social networking between teachers and students provides an opportunity to talk about media literacy, such as appropriate ways to use media.

"Right now we're talking about the youth vote, but a few years from now these voters will be young parents. I think teachers will be able to plug into social media to stay in touch with those young parents and keep folks engaged and involved," she said.

Carr said she recognizes that finding ways to use online social networking either in the classroom or as a way to stay connected to young parents might be a daunting idea for some schools.