Blog Journal 4

So far this semester I have been trying to keep a wide range of different educational sources available to myself through twitter. I follow many national educational pages as well as my fellow classmates in order to see their opinion on certain educational issues that are affecting our nation at the moment. I’ve found the use of twitter quite beneficial to exposing myself to important events and issues dealing with not only education, but the nation and world as a whole. I think I could see myself using Twitter to send announcements to parents and helping them stay informed as I have about important issues.

When looking at the digital divide in classrooms, you can’t only look at if the student has access or not to the material. It is quintessential to ask if the students can actually use the material as well. I have been a part of the EDF 1005 course this year and I am participating in a mentorship program with the Ghazvini Institute and all the students’ courses are online and on the computers. No child is without access to the computer, yet they all are having immense issues still. Basic computer skills like typing haven’t been taught to them in a correct manner. Being able to transcribe basic information from paper to screen is an intense and laborious process for these children. It is important for students to not only have access to digital material but fully understand how to use it so that their learning may be enhanced, not hindered. Thinking about this as a future educator, I think I would want to set aside some time during each week in my classroom to teach my children basic typing skills and computer troubleshooting. Learning these skills in a fun way at a young age will help them close this gap more and more.

I have been experimenting with Edmodo for my Independent Learning Project. I would love to use this in my future classroom as a way to make and assign quizzes, give announcements to my students, and create a network for them to use with each other. This will help them in formulating their communication skills with peers and supervisors in the future. I also have been really interested in using Remind to send out alerts to my classes. I was able to use it a little in High School to send out alerts for my Yearbook staffers, but I’m so intrigued as to how practical it can be for a teacher in the classroom. I would most likely use it for important class updates, newsletter links, and other major materials. I would not use it to remind parents and students of their homework as there would be other resources in class for the students to build responsibility to remember their homework for themselves.