How can you provide equal access to the digital world to all learners?

I think that answering the quesiton of how to provide 'equal' access to a student is difficult.  As a teacher it is impossible to know everything about what every child in your classroom has access to.  It is more important in my opinion to give each student appropriate access.  There is only so much a teacher can do, and in that a teacher can only manage what kinds of access each student has while they are in the classtoom. 

I know growing up we had a classroom calender that had each student on it with rotating days, and when it was your turn you were able to go on the computer during a certain portion of the day and play things like number munchers or oregon trail.  I thought that that worked really well when I was in school and think that the structure of having different turns for computer or technology usage would work well in most classroom settings.  I do also believe though that since comptuer technology and internet usage is going to be so much more prevelant in our classrooms that it would be silly not to use computers and internet in many different way in lessons.

There is a way to provide acess to students while not just giving them turns on the computer.  I think that showing them how to use the internet in ways that can help learning is a great way to help kids understand that computers are for more than just social media. 

I also think that it would be helpful, especially for older classrooms, for teachers to occasionally stay after school and allow for students to use computers to do word processing or research for school projects of just to help them use the computers and different technologies for homework.  I think that a teacher will have to gauge each class differently and because of that I dont think that there is a way to ensure equal access, but I definitely think that it is up to the teacher to be able to include technology into lessons and in doing so creating opportunities for students to be strong digital learners.

Web Conference

I have found the Web Conference site to be super interesting.  It is really cool to me seeing how other teachers integrate technology into their classrooms.  For this assignment I watched a conference hat showed how two teachers that met through social media worked together to combine their two clasrooms over the internet.  They worked together and had lesson plans that they had their students work on together.  I hadn't even thought about using Skype in the classroom in that manner!   The two teachers also talked about how they had learned so much while trying to introduce these types of media to their students and how every time they have a new class things change so much.  I think that it is so fun and interesting because when I was in school we had a class from the other side of the country that we were Pen-Pals with.  This is the new generations version of pen pals, and its even better because the communication is in real time.  I think that finding new and exciting ways to teach kids how to use these media devices responsibly is such a great idea and after watching that conference I have been pretty excited to sit back down to watch another one to see what other cool ideas have been put into use recently!