Thursday is Bill of Rights Day and it’s a day for you to possibly get bills – dollar bills, that is – for college. Singers Ke$ha and Blake Shelton are among the celebrities involved in a Dec. 15 tweet-athon, in celebration of the 220^th anniversary of the Bill of Rights and its First Amendment. Let’s hear it for free speech!

The “Free to Tweet” effort encourages students ages 14 to 22 to share on Twitter how they enjoy their right to free expression. The best student Tweets – using #freetotweet – will win one of 22 scholarships, for $5,000. That’s a total of $110,000 in scholarships, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Other singers – Brad Paisley, Frankie Ballard, Darius Rucker, Joe Nichols, John Oates, Wynonna Judd, Sarah Jarosz, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Elenowen, Jana Kramer, Joanna Smith, and The Civil Wars – will be joining in with their tweets.

To be part of the scholarship contest, your tweet can stand alone or be linked to original content on a website or another type of social media. A panel of educators and First Amendment experts will review the entries and choose the scholarship winners.

So celebrate Bill of Rights Day – created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941 – by expressing yourself via social media and trying to win cash for school. We’ll be watching your tweets from @CollegeBoundNet!

–Lori Johnston

We’re back with one of our favorite recurring blog topics! Take a look at some of the interesting, thought-provoking, or just plain silly things that college-bound students are tweeting about these days:

–The CollegeBound Network

You don’t have to look far on a college campus to see how Steve Jobs (ironically a college dropout himself) has helped revolutionize higher education.

During just two hours today at the University of Georgia, where I am an adjunct journalism professor, I saw many students serving as living reminders of Jobs’ creations:

• A female student jogging on the perimeter of campus, with an iPod attached to her arm under a T-shirt and those omnipresent white Apple earbuds sticking out of her ears.

• A group of students huddled in a classroom hallway watching a video on the small iPhone screen.

• Groups of students texting or reading Facebook or Twitter messages from their iPhones while waiting for campus buses outside the football stadium and student center.

• A guy sleeping in the student center with a MacBook Pro in his lap and iTunes piping music into his earphones.

• Students with MacBook screens open, finishing assignments or assigned reading from their laptops, able to squeeze in the work before class begins.

• Mac desktops lined up on workstations in classrooms, where students are learning video editing using Mac software, updating class blogs, working together on group projects and completing other assignments.

• Professors and students toting iPads loaded with apps, textbooks and assigned reading, often making it more affordable to buy the downloadable version instead of a traditional textbook.

The technology advancements that defined Jobs’ career help make the college learning experience more vibrant, in the moment, and even affordable. When I required my magazine writing students to subscribe to a magazine this semester, one iPad owner discovered the iPad subscription was cheaper.

Earlier this week, I sent a message to students about a class assignment, and within seconds, a student responded via iPhone. That accessibility is something that professors and students often appreciate, turning learning into a 24-7 experience.

Many students are bringing Apples to classes these days–and they’re just not giving them to the teachers.

–Lori Johnston (Photos by Michael Barone)

Stop the insanity! If I have to hear about one more person’s nude photos getting “leaked” onto the Internet, I’m going to Super Poke my eyes out. (Which, by the way, I hear Facebook is thinking of getting rid of poking?)

I’m no Steve Jobs, but I do know a little bit about computers. And I know that when you delete something from your laptop or from Facebook, it’s never really gone. The same goes for cell phones. And the thing about hackers is that they enjoy hacking just about anyone’s cell phone. So while it’s embarrassing that Scarlett Johansson‘s personal photos ended up on websites all over the place, chances are we’ll forget all about it when she delivers her next incredible film performance.

For the rest of us “regular” folks, however, we need to be doubly careful. Sure, if my phone or computer gets hacked–not that I have incriminating photos on either of them, mind you–most of the world won’t know or even care. But the people I care about will be affected if I’ve gone and taken any stupid photos, and even more importantly, my actions could have a negative, lasting effect on my life. I could forever be known as “The girl who…” by everyone from my boss to my neighbor to my first grade teacher.

Really, the thought of it sends shivers up my spine.

Without an ounce of goody-two-shoesness in my tone, I’m telling all of you college students: Don’t be stupid. And if you are, keep it off of Facebook. And Twitter. And YouTube. There are currently too many “I told you so” lessons being taught right now, and unless you want to be the instructor of your own lesson, learn from other people.

–Barbara Bellesi

Just when you think you got high school figured out, it’s time to start thinking about college. Many high school students are wasting no time at all and are starting their college search during their sophomore year.

A recent study by Eduventures finds that 42 percent of high school students start looking at colleges as early as the second year of high school. The Boston company quizzed about 11,000 high school juniors and seniors in the U.S. to get their results.

Starting early is not a bad idea. In fact, getting a jump start on discovering which colleges and majors are of interest to you and how much it could cost to attend can help relieve some of the college search stress during your last year of high school. So go ahead: start thinking about whether a community college, public university, or private college is best for you. And don’t forget: starting early gives you more time to visit schools.

But starting early doesn’t mean students are narrowing the choices down more. The survey found:

• Almost 20 percent of students are now applying to 10 or more colleges and universities. (That’s a LOT of application fees!)

• The mean number of applications for high school seniors increased from 6.3 to 7.3 since 2008.

At the start of your search, you may be lured by a college’s glossy brochure showing a picturesque campus and giving an enticing overview of the reasons that you would want to attend. But as students get closer to high school graduation, the survey found them relying more on websites to get information about schools. The survey also says something you might have already suspected:  Social media outlets are becoming more common among juniors and seniors. In fact, a whopping 44 percent are using YouTube channels and 41 percent are using Facebook pages.

Did you start looking at colleges as a sophomore? How much have you relied on Facebook, YouTube and other social media in your college search?

–Lori Johnston

Want to get a sense of the highs and lows about being a college student? You’ll find realistic insight–in real time–on Twitter. Students’ comments capture the college experience – so here’s some of the honest truth about academics, relationships, money, and more.

Now’s the time to read all the comments – good and bad – because #incollege is trending on Twitter this week. Here’s a few of our favorites. If you’re on Twitter, go on and add some words of wisdom of your own.

–Lori Johnston

Just in case you were wondering whether or not we really support the idea of continuing to educate yourself at every opportunity, you should check out our tweets this week. CBN is at BlogWorld, and if that doesn’t sound like something related to college, well, consider this: We’re here so that we can learn how to keep getting better at bringing you the latest information and advice about every stage of the college and university admissions process.

We’ll be tweeting from @CollegeBoundNet, @CollegeSurfing, and @SpaBeautySchools, with liberal sprinkles of tweets from @GinaLaGuardia, @DawnPapandrea, and @TheWriteWoman (Barbara went rogue when choosing her Twitter handle). And our hashtag of choice is #BWENY.

Since we’ll be glued to our laptops and iPads, feel free to tweet us a question or comment and we’ll be sure to respond. Hooray for fun conferences!

–The CollegeBound Network

Though the weather is still trying to catch up with what the calendar says, spring has finally arrived. And with it comes the proverbial spring fever, where people are so excited by the thought of more daylight hours that they do, say, and yes, tweet things that are a bit out of character. Check out some of these tweets in the “Spring Fever” edition of our popular series:

COLLEGE-BOUND KIDS TWEET THE DARNDEST THINGS

Not exactly the best way to make your college decision…

Whoa! Party in his dorm room!

That’s one way of staying focused!

Sounds like it (and we’ll even excuse the spelling).

Hope she doesn’t smudge a nail on a rejection letter!

Umm….word?

So what happens until then?

That is, if Kanye lets you finish…

If you say so…

???

–The College Bound Network