I absolutely love twitter and I enjoy using it as a classroom tool. I have been following a variety of educational technology, English education, and famous educator accounts to try and learn more about the field. I think twitter provides a nice community and you get to create that community yourself. For this class, my community is becoming one of future and current educators and you can always learn from advice or the experiences of others, as they are always relevant to your own experiences somehow.
The digital divide, when students don't have the same access across the board to technology at home, is a result of socioeconomic variation. When students don't have the same opportunities to work with technology at home, they don't have equal skills and abilities to succeed in your class. As a classroom teacher, one will no doubt come across instances of the digital divide and must create ways of dealing with this problem. A teacher must plan for some way for a student to do an alternate assignment or find a way for students that don't have access to technology to get it.
I really like the idea of educational games. When I was a student it was a fun way to learn and be a kid at the same time. I think students need a break to learn in different ways and educational games also give teachers a break as students behave well when they are focused on a task they typically enjoy. I want to teach 1st grade, which would involve basic games and basic levels of literacy and math. These go well together in activities for students and younger students get excited with the idea of being able to play games during school. I will probably use academic mapping the least as it might be tedious and a little much for younger students. Academic maps also require a deeper level of reflection and I'm not sure that 1st graders are necessarily ready for that quite yet.
In the past, probably 2009-2014 I had a Twitter obsession. Now that I don't use Twitter much, I have a hard time remembering to tweet twice a week.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Twitter being a nice resource, but I think it will be hard for teachers to keep up and form that online community that you mentioned above.
ReplyDeleteCompletely agree with you about twitter, I think it's a really cool interface and I'm ready to do more with it. I also think that alternative assignments are good for students on the other side of the digital divide at first, but I do think that they should be taught how to complete the same assignments just with more resources and the use of school technology. If they never get the opportunity to work with technology they will not be able to function in the workplace, something educators must make sure that students are able to do.
ReplyDeleteI would suggest that instead of alternate assignments for students with limited access to technology, you help those students get access to school computers and give them classroom time (if possible) to complete the assignment. This will better prepare these students for the competitive workforce.
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