Week Two

IN CLASS

This week we looked at a potential teacher resource online at http://www.brainpop.com/

Personally, I found this site irrelevant to my area of study because it is relatively juvenile when considering the age group that I will be working with upon graduation. I feel that this web service is much more suited for elementary rather than secondary students.

POST CLASS

This week our assigned readings included a BBC News article and a scholarly journal piece reflecting over the "digital divide".

The article from BBC News was very short and difficult to completely grasp the importance of the “digital divide” issue due to its inherent lack of depth. In the same respect, the journal article was extremely long and hard to read because of all of its technical verbiage and mathematical renderings. However, I gauged the difficulty of this problem through both these articles. It is obvious that the lack of technology is a major issue for educators. Still, it is a problem that has not been overcome and I almost feel as if it will never be fully dealt with. The articles raised practical questions within me. For example in the BBC article it mentioned a possible yet extremely simplistic answer to the “digital divide”:

“This means that projects like One Laptop Per Child, who want governments to build $100 laptops and give them away to tens of millions of children, need to ensure that their advanced technology is used within a broader context of education and support so that the social infrastructure is in place as well as the technical.”

This is ridiculous! All I can think of is my $600 Dell and its questionable efficiency! Throwing poorly developed technology to financially struggling schools is not going to help them any. So what if they have a computer if it crashes every two months?

In all, technology is constantly changing. Even if we begin to bridge the “digital divide” today, we are almost certain to encounter a new one tomorrow.