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Teens love their cell phones. Duh! But just how often are they using their mobile phones and why? Leveraging the data provided by the recent Nielsen study, "New Mobile Obsession: U.S. Teens Triple Data Usage", FunMobility decided to explore cell phone usage patterns further. The result of our FunChat and FAADChat customer survey with over 10,000 respondents generated even more interesting data points. The survey found teens are spending more time on mobile devices than any other media device, and 40 percent are spending more than four hours per day on their mobile devices. And that's just the beginning. We turned this data into an infographic: "Generation OMG: How Teens Use Mobile Devices", that we just announced and was recently covered by ZDNet's iGeneration blog.

Having surveyed teenagers in 30 countries, they revealed that the number of teenagers claiming to be active on Facebook (ie. doing more than just "liking" a separate page on the web) had dropped to 56% in the third quarter of 2013, from 76% in the first. The biggest decline in active usage (by 52%) was in the Netherlands; there was a 16% fall for American teens. Where are they going instead? Not surprisingly, it's mobile chat services like WeChat, and photo-sharing apps like Instagram and Snapchat. What's truly startling though, is how quickly global teenagers are taking up the services instead:

60second Recap® wants to make the great works of literature accessible, relevant, and, frankly, irresistible to today's teens. Through 60second Recap® video albums, we seek to help teens engage with the best books out there ... not just to help them get better grades, but to help them build better lives.

"Facebook made a startling admission in its earnings announcement this month: it was seeing a "decrease in daily users, specifically among teens". In other words, teenagers are still on Facebook; they're just not using it as much as they did. It was a landmark statement, since teens are the demographic who often point the rest of us towards the next big thing."

"An Australian teen has caused havoc on Twitter by discovering an "exploit" that hit thousands of users, including US President Barack Obama's press secretary, and resulted in the tweets of a former British PM's wife linking to hardcore porn."

Interesting to consider how this student reacted when he found the exploit and what he then did (and didnt do). Great discussion for the IT classroom.

"Own Your Space--Keep Yourself and Your Stuff Safe Online" Digital Book for Teens by Linda McCarthy

In some ways, the flipped model is an improvement. Research shows that tailored tutoring is more effective than lectures for understanding, mastery, and retention. But the flipped classroom doesn't come close to preparing students for the challenges of today's world and workforce. As progressive educational activist Alfie Kohn notes, great teaching isn't just about content but motivation and empowerment: Real learning gives you the mental habits, practice, and confidence to know that, in a crisis, you can count on yourself to learn something new. That's crucial in a world where, according to the U.S. Department of Labor Statistics, adults change careers (not just jobs) four to six times or where, as an Australian study predicts, 65% of today's teens will end up in careers that haven't even been invented yet. We don't need to flip the classroom. We need to make it do cartwheels.

A digital copy of Danah Boyd's new book on social lives of teens.

"The latest social media application to stir up controversy among teens has prompted one Lincoln Park school to ask students to delete Yik Yak and parents to make sure their child doesn't reinstall it."

"The track record of commercial products designed with privacy as a top priority has been abysmal - at least until recently. The ephemeral texting app Snapchat is turning assumptions upside down about young people and their desire for digital privacy."

"Cyber-bullying, update-addiction, sexting - from the perspective of a parent raising a ''digital native'' child, social media seems fraught with dangers. But new research suggests the risks inherent in social media use by younger generations might be overblown. danah boyd, assistant research professor at Harvard and principal researcher for Microsoft Research - like k.d.lang, she prefers the lower case - has completed a large-scale study on how US teenagers use the internet in general, and social media in particular. Her book is called It's Complicated, and is the result of in-depth interviews with scores of teens over an eight-year period."

"Each weekday, we scour the Web for age-appropriate news stories that will interest tweens and teens and invite them to comment. All comments are moderated by their teachers before they are published."

"Revision is a critical piece of the writing process-and of your classroom curriculum. Now, Google Docs has partnered with Weekly Reader's Writing for Teens magazine to help you teach it in a meaningful and practical way. On this page, you will find several reproducible PDF articles from Writing magazine filled with student-friendly tips and techniques for revision. You'll also find a teacher's guide that provides you with ideas for how to use these materials with Google Docs to create innovative lesson plans about revision for your classroom."

ConnectSafely is for parents, teens, educators, advocates - everyone engaged in and interested in the impact of the social Web.