Stimulating Powerpoint can be seen here:
In light of the concepts of the digital divide and inequality and the National Education Technology Plan 2010 (NETP) guidelines, there are many things that I can now see that my school (and others) are doing that is not helping to alleviate the digital divide and inequality seen in the United States.
In regards to my own school and the learning aspect… I think at my school the idea of technology is seen purely as a hardware thing. If you are using the Elmo document reader and a LCD projector, you are seen as on top of it regarding technology….therefore, I thought I was on top of the tech thing till the first week of this class and I realized I could be using blogs and Tumblr’s etc. The most I’ve thought is making fake Facebook pages, but these other ideas are even better.
Assessment is very important and I’ve considered using spreadsheets and databases in order to track progress, but haven’t done it and haven’t been asked to do it or had it done while I was a student in the public schools. I think it’s an awesome idea. You can inspire the students as you show progress, have better interventions, etc. I also think that it could help with the whole ‘value-added’ approach to teacher evaluation. You can probably get some real good data utilizing differ]ent software programs .
Teaching could be vastly improved by the proper implementation of technology. My school right now has a program where teachers can take trainings on line. I think this is an awesome way to improve professional development (PD) time and I anticipate more of this type of training in the future. This way teachers can tailor their PD to their interests and schedules and probably even follow up better with the PD. It is often complained that after you do a PD it’s over and no follow up occurs. But if you did it online, it doesn’t seem like it could be that difficult to have the program do refresher courses, have quizzes, and just basically check in with you periodically.
Infrastructure….the school I’m at now seems like it has a decent infrastructure. I wish the wi-fi covered the whole school and not just parts of it, but the fact that we have some wi-fi is cool. They have a couple computer labs, an abundance of document readers and projectors to lend out, any teacher can have a laptop checked out to them, they license some programs like Career Cruize, or something like that so students can look into career stuff. I think we are definitely on the right track and don’t have any complain.
In order to help increase the success of these students, schools need to think about the aforementioned categories and the recommendations outlined in the Powerpoint video attached to this post. Schools are not doing enough to help shore up the inequalities found in our schools and society. If we were adhering to the NETP standards at the minimum, and students were still behind, that would be another problem, but that is not the case and we need to get on the ball.
Collections of a Special EDucator 