One of our discussion board questions this week was whether we thought our school was keeping up with technology. This really got me thinking about the impact of the digital divide. In our nations history there has always been a divide between the rich and the poor and that has impacted all realms of life, including education. Now while some may think that technology isn’t affected by that, I am here to say you are sadly mistaken. I see the digital divide every day at our school. Our school is the drop out school of the district. We get the students that have been kicked out of all the other schools and we have to keep them here no matter what because there is just no other place for them except the streets. We have the highest minority rate, 75% free and reduced lunch and 75% of our students have IEP’s. We are also the only school in our district without air conditioning, the only school without ANY wireless capabilities and the school that gets flooded every year because they won’t spend the money to rebuild our levy.
To make matters worse, the highest achieving school in town (with upper middle class students) just got approved for a million dollar geo-thermal heating system to be put in....while we got our budget cut for our renovation (the last high school in town to get one) that was supposed to be started in 2009. So in regards to technology... we are the last to get anything... we get everyone else’s left overs because they think all our students will do is steal them, now seriously.. do you really think our kids are going to just go into a room and walk out of the building with a gigantic Dell monitor and tower? And they wonder why our students don’t try on state tests... what is the point when they are treated like lower class citizens?
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Hi Stephanie, when I read about digital divide I was interested as my AR project is on that topic. I discovered is more than one divide, the immigrants and the natives (according to Marc Prensky, though am starting a movement to call them new/experienced digital learners so as not to segregate them). I realize that divide to which you refer is far more serious and troubling as there is an element of unfairness involved. It would be nice if in those students IEPs the objectives included access to technology. Perhaps then they would qualify for grants from the state or federal govt. One thing web 2.0 could be used for is to raise awareness of the situation so the playing field could be leveled and morale/student achievement could be raised. Good luck!
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