Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

Report: 72 percent of adults now send text messages

Texting among adults is on the rise, with more than 72 percent of those over 18 using the technology—but their usage still pales in comparison to texting among teenagers, who send an average of five times as many texts as their adult counterparts, PC Magazine reports. Of the 2,252 people surveyed by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, about 72 percent of adults said they sent text messages in May 2010, compared with 65 percent of adults surveyed in September 2009. Adult texters are sending an average of 10 texts per day, while those ages 12 to 17 are sending about 50 texts per day. There are some prolific adult texters—about 5 percent of adults send 200 texts per day or more; about 15 percent of teens do the same. Gender is not a major factor when it comes to texting; men and women send and receive the same number of texts on a daily basis. The report also found that if you text often, it’s likely that you also make a lot of voice calls. The reverse also was true: A small number of texts also translated into a small number of calls. Broken down by race, Pew found that African Americans and Hispanics are “more intense and frequent” users of a phone’s capabilities than whites. Parents with children under 18 in the home are also more likely to own a phone than those without kids, Pew said…

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Supreme Court hears text-messaging privacy case

The U.S. Supreme Court will likely rule that government employees have no right to privacy when they send text messages using their business phones.
The Supreme Court will decide whether government employees should have any expectation of privacy when they send text messages using work-issued phones.

In a case with implications for public schools and colleges, the U.S. Supreme Court appears likely to rule against public employees who claimed a local government violated their right to privacy by reading racy text messages they sent through their employers’ account.

Several justices said April 19 that the employer, the Ontario, Calif., police department, acted reasonably in monitoring the text messages in view of its written policy warning employees they have no guarantee of privacy in the use of office computer and electronics equipment.

Justice Stephen Breyer said he didn’t see “anything, quite honestly, unreasonable about that.”…Read More