Pew Mining and Infographic

Lenhart, A. (April 9, 2015).  Teens, social media & technology overview 2015. Pew Research Center. Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/04/09/teens-social-media-technology-2015/.  

I read an article from the Pew Research Center about how teens are using technology and social media.  The article was full of survey information and data which made it hard to read if there were any distractions around.  I took the information from this article and created an infographic with the highlights of the article.  What I learned from this article is that the majority of teenagers are using technology everyday and in a variety of ways. I don't think that's surprising information.  Now anyone who has been around kids these days knows that they are always "plugged in" to something, but what exactly are they doing?  According to the data that was collected, teens are accessing the internet on computers, laptops, smartphones, and tablets and using them for messaging, social media, pin boards, discussion boards, and using sites as well as apps. I was surprised that they reported that the average number of messages (texting and in apps) is 30 per day.  My girls are overachievers in that category!  The most common social media site among teens is Facebook.  This also surprised me because the teens in my life are very into Twitter and Instagram and have been for a couple of years.

 I think the most interesting part of the survey was the collection of gender, racial, and social-economic statistics.  Of course the survey showed what we would have expected - kids from wealthier families have more access to technology.  But what I didn't expect was that more African American teens (85%) have smartphones than white (71%)  and Hispanic students (71%) and that African American and Hispanic youth are online more than their white counterparts.  They also broke down the number of teens that have access to gaming systems.  72% of teenagers play video games with the majority of them being boys (84%).  Girls are not as into the games at only 59% but they beat out the boys in the use of social media.   75% of all teens have smartphones and 15% have basic cell phones with only 10% having neither.

I looked at 3 web based tools to create an infographic to go with this article - , Piktochart, Easel.ly and Inforgr.am.  While they all had free templates, I chose to go use Piktochart because it was easiest to use.  I like that I could create my own background because I didn't feel that the templates matched my content.  Both of the other two web based tools had issues with the version of Internet Explorer on my laptop, but worked well with Google Chrome.  Easel.ly has a lot of included graphics that are easy to use, but the templates were not very user friendly.  Infogr.am had the fewest templates of the three tools.  It was created to be more like Microsoft Excel in the way that you entered the data into charts.

Here is the infographic that I created to go with the data in this article. You may go directly to Piktochart for a full size presentation at:   https://magic.piktochart.com/editor/piktochart/7930021# . You may also click on the title in the image to go to the article. (48 pages)

    
- Lisa