EME2040 Blog Journal 5: The Digital Divide

 My early experiences using twitter have been lackluster if I am being completely honest. I still have not done a Twitter Chat, and I do not fully understand how to engage with one. I don't think that I will be using twitter a whole lot outside of this class, I'm not much of a social media person. In the mean time though, I need to  figure out how to engage with a twitter chat. #edchat is tonight. How are we supposed to know what the topic is? 

The Digital Divide is the disparity between students who have access to technology and those who do not. The belief is that students who have home internet and computer access are at a disadvantage. A student without online access may have more difficulty doing assignments at home, accessing websites, and contacting their teacher outside of school hours. This happened frequently at my highschool, where an assignment would require online or computer access in some way, and some students did not have access to at home. The teachers at my school, throughout the entirety of my K-12 education, never cared. They expected the students to just figure it out, and often told them that to their faces. I feel like I could avoid this in my future classrooms by not making assignments that require some sort of internet access. If I do make an assignment that requires internet access I will help to accomodate the students that do not have that access.

I think its interesting that the second paragraph wants us to discuss how many students are at a disadvantage because they don't have easy internet access, then the third wants us to describe the software we will implement in our classes. It will have to be software I'm not making students use at home, because that wouldn't be fair to the students who cannot use software. I think that Prezi is an obvious choice, and it would be easy to integrate with class computers availble. I could give my students time during the day to make high quality presentations with Prezi. Another piece of software is Quizlet. I love quizlet and its uses. It provides for a fun and interactive way to study, and I think that it has a competive nature does help a lot of students to learn more, while still being light hearted enough to not harm the development of others.

I have never used badges before, and do not know what to think just yet. I think a positive reinforcement and reward system is really good in an educational setting. Badges seem like a fun alternative for motivating success. The current system involves grades, and negative reinforcement to mistakes. Badges sound better than that, and like a means to make the entrenched grade system more bearable. I have connected recieving good grades to positive reinforcement and success though. Maybe that is not a good thing?