Tuesday, February 21, 2012

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.

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