Hey everyone! Time for Blog Post #4!

So early twitter is going okay... It's kind of a chore to keep up with to be honest. I never use twitter in a professional way, personally. I either tweet memes or articles I find interesting, but nothing really education related. So it's hard to be professional on something that you're used to using for anything that's as unprofessional as possible (like dank memes).

The digital divide affects schools because students who don't have the same technological skills as others have fewer skills, a harder time adapting to changing technological environments, and have less confidence in their skills. Causes simply lay in class divides. A student from a working class family in a lower class neighborhood does not have the same capabilities as a wealthier student from a more prosperous community. Even though students without computers can go to libraries for school, accessibility is still a problem here, and more underprivileged communities are not as up to date as wealthier communities. This would be very difficult to address as a teacher. Perhaps group work would help with this, so students can work together if not everyone has a computer, with established meeting times in a computer lab or library.

Lastly, I feel like all of the software mentioned in the chapter can be really helpful for learning. I would probably more emphasize Reference, tutorial, database, and problem solving softwares more, though. Reference software goes hand in hand with the Copyrights chapter we just had, too! And tutorials are important because especially if there's a digital divide, not everyone in the classroom may know how to do certain things, so it's good to have everyone go through tutorials. Also, navigating databases is tricky, but with tutorials and in class use, they should be really helpful! And lastly, problem solving is a critical part of learning, so that's definitely a must for the classroom.

And that's it! Until next

I think we can all agree it wasn't so bad that chapter 9 was so short, haha.

But first, let's talk a little about the ELA standards. I think the ABCDT acronym is really helpful! I think that the authority, bias, content, design, and technical elements are pretty easy to teach, because whenever we do research for any reason, we have to determine whether a website is credible enough to use for the research. There are many things that the podcast mentioned, though, that I had not thought of before. For example, I wouldn't think to check the website stability and the links. I probably would have assigned a website or something for students to look at without checking the links, but the podcast explains pretty well the dangers of inappropriate links on a website. Also, I didn't think it mattered whether you outsourced links or typed them in. So I definitely need to look more into how to look deeper into a website's credentials and associations.

I would primarily like to use wikis, web blogs, and other web-based media for my students. Last semester, one of my assignments for my Middle East history class was to edit Wikipedia. It could be anything we wanted--just as long as it was related to what we learned over the whole course. I definitely learned a lot from this assignment and it helped me with my writing. It was hard and time consuming, but a good move on the professor's part, I think. And then, videos, podcasts, and graphics are always helpful for learning too. And posting on blogs like this is a good way to debrief from reading and retain what you've read and learned.

I mainly learned about functions that I didn't know existed with the newsletter assignment. It was pretty easy to figure out, but it was discovering where everything was that took forever. Here is my newsletter! Excuse the fact that Microsoft underlined part of it.