Blog Journal 4

With my Education Technology Twitter account I am able to see news regarding legislation about education shifts and changes. I am also able to see articles that my fellow classmates are tweeting and retweeting, which are very interesting reads. It is very beneficial because I can stay up to date with the news and I can also see what other people are interested in regarding the Education Occupation. Twitter will be helpful in the future because as an educator I can use twitter to pull up recent articles or look at what is trending online for education shifts in our country and state.

Digital divide, the term regarding the gap of those who can and cannot access technology in classrooms, can effect students success in school by limiting a student to how they can access information whether in school or at home. Limited access to information means that this student will not be able to research or learn as much as another student and after school this can lead to starting in the workforce or going into a higher education setting at a disadvantage. Causes of this disadvantage are schools being unable to provide technology because they are in a poorer part of town and not getting as much aid from the state. Another cause is a child living in a home where the parts cannot afford to have computers or cell phones with Internet or homes where signal is bad and maybe the computer or device is very old and does not work well.

As a teacher I may experience students not being able to do homework when they are home and in this case I will offer students to stay a little bit after school with me to go to a computer lab or library and access computers if they need to so that they can get work done. If students have an older computer at home and it doesn’t work too well and it stops working during an assignment, I will allow them to make it up before school for full credit or after school for a little bit off their total grade. Another way to help is doing more written and textbook work so that they have opportunities to bring up their grades.

I think the top 2 software types I will use are desktop publishing so that I can create review sheets for my students and create flyers/posters that kids can look at for information. The other is most likely encyclopedias/dictionaries. Since I will be teaching at the college level I will want my students to be able to look up information online and in person and use these two useful references for the information the gain. I will most likely not use education games or the illustration program because I wont have students over the age of 18 playing games. I would least likely use the illustration program because I would rather just use pictures I already have instead of learning how to create my own and I don’t plan on teaching a illustration class section.