The report is based on data from a survey conducted in 2010 that looks at broadband usage in schools and libraries. The survey found that almost all respondents have some form of broadband connection to at least one facility. Just 2% use satellite and 3% use dial-up in order to access the Internet.

However, nearly 80% of all survey respondents say their broadband connections do not fully meet their current needs. 55% say that slow connection speed is the primary reason their needs aren't met. 39% says that cost of service is the major barrier to meeting their Internet needs. 27% cite installation costs as the barrier. Rural schools and libraries, in particular, struggle to provide adequate bandwidth to their users.

What Are E-Rate Recipients Using Broadband For?

Email tops the list of the most-used app by E-rate users. 98% of respondents say that's what Internet access is regularly used for and 69% say it's the most essential app. For libraries, online reference materials are the most important and most used app. 86% of library staff and patrons regularly use online reference materials, and 62% say it's the most essential tool they access online.

Schools and libraries both indicate that they see usage increasing. For example, 56% of all E-rate survey respondents say they plan on expanding their usage of digital textbooks in the next 2 years, and 45% say they plan to implement or expand their use of handheld devices for educational purposes. Currently, the average student-to-computer ratio of those schools responding to the survey is 5.86 to 1.

According to the FCC, this data will help the agency make better policy decisions for the E-rate program. The FCC has made better broadband access one of its major goals.

SecureRF Corporation, a company specializing in secure RFID software, proposed the project to the school district. Funding for the project could come by way of a $100,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, which the company is close to finalizing.

One of the alternative uses the company has offered to the district is to enable tracking on school busses to see who uses the busses and how often. The data collected from experiments like these could be used to better budget the school funds, potentially opening up more money to underfunded areas of education, like the arts. Some district board members raised questions about privacy, but the experiments will likely be opt-in if they are given the green light.

Anyone who has driven through a toll station on a highway without having to stop to drop a few coins knows the potential for RFID to improve and optimize our everyday lives. For school officials tasked with managing hundreds of students across large campuses, technology like this could make their jobs much easier, keeping kids safer.

President-elect Obama has always made technology in the classroom a central focus when discussing education policy, and there is clearly a pressing need for bringing more technology to the classroom to train students for a job market where these skills are now mandatory. It should be noted, though, that technology is often the least pressing of all the problems faced by some of these disadvantaged schools.

CC-licensed image used courtesy of Flickr user Extra Ketchup.

Facebook Hits 100 Million Users

Fast growing social network Facebook has hit the 100 million users mark, according to a statement this week by Dave Morin, the company's Senior Platform Manager.

How does that compare to MySpace's ascent? A guy named Rick appears to have become MySpace's 100 millionth registered user in 2006. MySpace took 3 years after launch to hit that magic number; for Facebook it took 4 years and 6 months.

Back to School: 10 Great Web Apps for College Students

For a lot of college students, the new semester is just around the corner. Last year, we created a long list of great Web 2.0 tools that we thought would be helpful for college students.

But given how fast things develop on the web, we thought we would revisit this topic again this year and look at some of the most useful Web 2.0 tools that have the potential to help students do better in school, collaborate with their fellow students, and save them time.

Online Accounting: State of the Market

Accounting software for small business and personal use is increasingly moving from the desktop to online. However, compared to other office software, this transition to online has been relatively slow. Partly that's due to user reticence: writing a document online and sharing it with others (via Google Docs, Office Live, Zoho, or whatever you use) is one thing. Entering sensitive financial information into your browser is harder to adjust to.

So what is the state of online accounting software? In this post we tell you about our awkward experiences trying out different packages. Also do check out the comments, because there's a lot of new info there.

Jaiku Returns With Unlimited Invites

When Google acquired the microblogging service Jaiku in October of last year, many people had high hopes for Jaiku's future. Would a Google-flavored Twitter soon show up everywhere from iGoogle to the upcoming Android handset, we wondered? Instead, news from the company slowed to a trickle and the doors stayed locked to newcomers - signs that many took to mean Google had essentially abandoned the service. But this week, things are happening at Jaiku once again - most notably, unlimited invites are now available. Is Jaiku poised to make a comeback?

Sweetcron: Your Lifestream on Your Server

We were pretty excited when we first heard about Sweetcron, a self-hosted lifestreaming application developed by Yongfook. This week, after a bit of a delay, Sweetcron has finally released its software and we immediately downloaded and installed it ourselves. While it is still pretty barebone, Sweetcron represents a great solution for those who don't necessarily want to participate in the discussions on Friendfeed, but still would like to set up a lifestream.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Web Trends

RWW Live: Online Music (Special Guests From Imeem, Yahoo Music, Rhapsody)

In this week's episode of RWW Live, our live podcast show, our topic was online music and we had 3 very special guests on the show: Dalton Caldwell, founder and CEO of Imeem; Lucas Gonze, founder of Webjay and until recently a senior member of the Yahoo Music team; and Rob Williams, Senior VP of Music Software at RealNetworks. Also on the show were Sean Ammirati (host), Richard MacManus and Marshall Kirkpatrick. The audio is archived below for your listening pleasure.

The show included many interesting factoids about Imeem, Yahoo Music and Rhapsody. But more importantly there was a lot of fascinating discussion of online music trends and where the music industry is headed.

You can listen to the entire show here (select Episode 6):

Along with the podcast show, we also ran a poll: What are your favorite online music streaming services? See the results below, and vote for your favorites:

Google Moves to Mainstream RSS With A Simple Name Change

For all its supposed simplicity, Really Simple Syndication or RSS has continued to confuse and intimidate millions of people online years after its introduction. What can be done to make RSS more mainstream? Google plans to roll out a small but simple feature that could go a long way. We wouldn't be surprised to see every blog publishing service follow suit.

"Follow this blog" is a clear call to action and those words will soon grace the header of every blog on Blogger.com around the web. When users click that link they'll be taken to either a tab on their Blogger dashboard, presumably if they have an account and are logged in, or be introduced to Google Reader, the company's RSS reader. It's a simple, brilliant plan and we wonder what took so long.

See also: Speed Up RSS? FriendFeed's Going to Try

"Facebook Helped Me Win," Claims Politician

In Tampa, Florida, a local politician is giving credit to Facebook for his recent win in the primaries for the local County Commission. On Facebook, the crowd is still very young, with an average age of 22.96 as of this February. Typically, the youth vote, although coveted, could not be counted on thanks to low turnout of young voters at the polls. However, this small time local election may prove to be one of the first examples of the huge impact Gen Y can have on the political process.

Everything You Thought You Knew About the Business of YouTube Was Wrong

Have you turned up your nose at YouTube for being born from low quality, financially unsustainable, pirated content? If you've made that argument in conversation before (and we know many people do) - new claims from YouTube itself now indicate that you'd be wrong. Google claims that 90% of the owners of copyrighted content are now advertising against pirated video they own, when they find it using YouTube's new content ID technology. The news upends many long held beliefs about the site.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

TeachStreet is based in Seattle and raised a $2.25 million Series A round led be Madrona Venture Group in February 2008. TeachStreet's strategy for now seems to be to roll the service out slowly, one metro area at a time. Currently, Portland and Seattle are the only locations officially available on the site, though teaches from anywhere can list their classes on the site as well.

TeachStreet aggregates classes from various sources and allows teachers to list their own classes (or claim a class that TeachStreet already lists). At least for the Portland area, most of the classes listed on the site are from local community colleges, community organizations, and language or music schools. Teachstreet wants to inspire local experts to start teaching, but for now, it seems that it is mostly established teachers and schools who are listing their services on the site.

Finding Classes

TeachStreet's search functions are very comprehensive and allow prospective students to restrict their search to different class sizes, age groups, ability levels, and days of the week a given class is offered. In our tests, the results we got from the search were typically very acurate (down to the days and times the classes were offered).

But What About Craigslist?

TeachStreet's most direct competitor is obviously Craigslist. In contrast to Craigslist, though, TechStreet offers its data in a far more structured way and it allows students to leave reviews of classes as well. TeachStreet's inventory of classes is also a lot more comprehensive than anything Craigslist could offer. Some enterprising TeachStreet users have, however, found a way of using TeachStreet as a tool to create Craigslist ads.

Another competitor for TeachStreet is Takelessons.com, though it focusses mostly on music, dance, and acting lessons and hence has a slightly more restricted inventory of classes.

TeachStreet is an interesting tool, both for teachers to gain more visibility, and for students to find the right classes. Thanks to its excellent search functions and well-designed layout, it stands a good chance of making a name for itself as it continues to roll out its service accross the US.

In some journalism schools around the US, it just might be. Would that really be so bad? Though many may disagree with us, we think there is some merit to teaching new media in journalism and other schools.

The world is changing, media education has probably always needed to change and this point in history offers some exciting opportunities for educators and students.

Making The Changes

Old media is slower, less compelling and more expensive than many emerging media online. It's also more professional, often of higher quality and generally easier to monetize. The same could be said of old vs internet new in almost any industry where new players are fast taking leadership positions they would not have been able to access so easily without the technologies in question.

We think the video short series Good Morning, Internet (right) captures some parts of this dilemma well.

What will the future of media work look like, for participants old and new? Good places to look for detailed guesses include the Poynter Institute, Kansas Proffesor of Digital Ethnography Dr. Michael Wesch and blogging media critic Jeff Jarvis (see Jarvis's post on Editor 2.0 in particular).

Can You Teach New Media In School?

The new media world of blogging, RSS, tagging, wikis, podcasting and more is all so new that there are hardly any established standards or best practices well established yet. That said, there are definitely skill sets that make a world of difference in a practitioner's efficacy.

Can those skill sets be taught in school? Most people we talked to said that schools could do well to facilitate learning experiences regarding new media. We believe, however, that there are large amounts of tangible information that can be transmitted to students in any setting that will enable them to have far more meaningful experiments in learning.

Drop a sucker in SecondLife and they'll be an avatar for a day, teach them how to learn about and navigate to the most interesting events going on there and they'll...well, you get the idea.

Update: A number of people have responded in comments, arguing that it's not the skills that need to be taught, it's knowledge about the issues. Ethics, history, ethos, etc. While that's all very important, the skills themselves are not trivial, either. As we responded in comments:

it's one thing to figure out how to use social media tools, another to learn how to use them powerfully in a professional context. I see that there are a number of people here saying it's "issues" that educators need to focus on, but I believe that proficiency in the use of the technologies themselves warrants extensive education as well.

For example, journalists should know how to run a feed through a filter and then monitor it by IM/SMS. Just knowing different ways to do this is material enough for one short class session. Strategic considerations in doing it better than a competitor does are material enough for another session.

Journalists should know how to navigate Wikipedia, reading edit history effectively and understanding participants in conversations there in context. I'd love to spend one class session learning about that. Ethics and case studies could surely be one part of it, but the mechanics of advanced use of these tools are complex enough that teaching them is a good idea.

Can that information be transmitted to students in a school setting, though? Students may be better off spending an hour watching all the 5 minute Social Media in Plain English videos from Common Craft.

Academia tends to be woefully behind in almost everything it teaches. Experience in the private sector tends to be a faster and more effective method of learning almost anything. Hard sciences may be the exception.

The internet is changing faster than almost anything in this world, so expecting academics to be capable of offering timely teaching in this field may lead to serious disappointment. That may be shortchanging a lot of hard working teachers fired up about the web, though.

There is Hope

Looking at what Dr. Michael Wesch teaches college students, what the incredible Vicki Davis manages to do with Elementary school students and the internet and what popular education blogger Stephen Downes advises - it is clear that there is some powerful potential for teaching new media.

Nonprofit technologist Amy Sample Ward, who graduated with a Major in New Media from Valparaiso University in Indiana, explains what one new media teacher, Milan Andrejevich, was able to help her learn.

For new media 'courses' to be successful, in my opinion, the 'teaching' and 'learning' need to be synonymous. Experiential learning and project-based assignments are really the only way to provide a space to learn and discuss new media tools. For example, a project that I had in one of my new media classes, was to take the regional newspaper's website, and re-vamp it be an actual community space using new media tools for story-telling, community building, and up-to-the-minute input. We even had the chance to present our changes to the newspaper staff. It doesn't get much more 'real' than that; and made us all focus on the biggest lesson of new media application: it needs to fit, not just be cool.

There's certainly no substitute for experience, but there are some basic skills that new practitioners can benefit from being taught by someone else. We're sure there will be a lot of bad New Media departments popping up in colleges around the world, but we believe there is hope that many others will be worth attending, too.

Photo at top: "School Rules" by Flickr user zzellers