Reflecting on this assignment of Digital Divide includes many parts. I really wanted to study the relationship between the haves and the have nots. I wanted to show how giving money to the Title I schools for technology and not to the working poor schools that don't get extra funding, made technology inequality very apparent to me. However, after studying all the data on the education rate of Colorado, the test scores of 8th graders in Colorado, the state and federal spending of education in Colorado, I didn't come to that conclusion. What I did come to conclude is that technology needs to reduce inequality within the haves and the have nots. We as a nation need to make sure that we consciously make efforts to bridge this divide because as I have learned in all this research, we certainly don't need to make it worse.
It's very apparent to me that we need to make sure to integrate technology into the lives of our students. We will be having online testing in Colorado starting in 2014. There will not be additional funding to make this happen. If you only have a lab of 30 computers in your school, you will find that your technology integration will be very sparse with all of the mandatory tests our students will be taking online. I was happy to see some solutions to these difficulties as I learned many resources that our state has in place to build this gap and get everyone access.
The digital skills of our students need to be embedded as natural as picking up a pencil or turning on the lights in our classrooms. We need to use technology to create, curate and develop those higher thinking skills so that this innovative platform can live up to the promise of building the technology future with the lives of today.
As you will see in the video, I really focused on how we will be getting access to the internet to those that don't have it. It was also very clear to me that the quality of access is as important as the access itself. That will have to be another voice thread, another day.
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