Some 90 members of The National Council of Urban Education Associations joined or invited colleagues to join their Association's new social network designed to support learning and sharing of "how-to" and Web 2.0 best practices.

NCUEA, a caucus of local affiliates of the National Education Association (NEA), which is dedicated to strengthening member advocacy and making the NEA more responsive to member needs, held its annual conference in San Jose, California earlier this December. Over 400 members attended.

Three technology-focused workshops designed to inform caucus members about leveraging social networks, e-mail, You-Tube and other Web 2.0 tools where seated to capacity.

To learn more about NCUEA's Social Network or obtain more information about the Technology sessions offered at NCUEA, visit NCUEA's Social Network.

Aqua Turf, Southington, Connecticut

CEA-Retired provides its members a forum to continue a commitment to improve public education by working with active members.

The organization encourages member participation at the political level by promoting CEA and NEA legislative agendas. CEA-Retired also offers its members opportunities to stay connected through social events such as the Fall Issues Conference at which I had the privilege of presenting to some 200 members.

My session Social Media: What's it all about? focused on taking a look how active CEA Retired folks are online and how they spend their time while on the Internet. This data was compared to a summer PewInternet study titled Older Adults and Social Media.

I spent some time with the group talking about how Blogs, Wikis, Twitter and Social Networks work as well as explored how their association was using these tools to strengthen and build the association in the 21st Century. We then reviewed Facebook and privacy issues.

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