Blog Journal 4

My EME 2040 twitter is not the first twitter account I have had. While I have been a twitter user since 2014, it has been different running this account since it is not a personal account and I am aiming to use it only to tweet about educational things. This is sort of difficult because it has been hard for me to find good accounts to follow. Tweeting has also been challenging because sometimes I don’t know what to tweet about but as the semester goes on, I am sure I will figure out a plan for my twitter. I have been tweeting back to the EME 2040 class twitter account, but I have mainly been retweeting tweets instead of tweeting people back. I have been retweeting from accounts such as @EducatorsRising, @NEAFoundation, and @TEDTalks. I have found my experiences beneficial because I have been able to find articles on education that could help me in my future career. Twitter itself may not be very beneficial in my future career since I will be teaching elementary education and I don’t see how much it could benefit me. I think there would be other things that would better improve my classroom. I do like though how I said that I can find some educational articles, but I feel like that is the only reason why I would use it.

The digital divide describes the space between people who have the ability and accessibility to use technology and those who don’t. The digital divide affects education since some students who can use technology may have an advantage against those who don’t. If there was an assignment that required at home computer access, one student may be able to succeed and complete the assignment with no problem. Another student who doesn’t have access to technology would be put at a disadvantage and would not be able to complete the assignment therefore would not receive a good grade. Causes of the digital divide would be a low-income family may not be able to afford technology. Another cause would be a student may have never taken a class or have been introduced to technology, so they wouldn’t be able to know how to use the technology even if they had the means to be able to use it. As a classroom teacher, I may experience a child not having technology at home or them not knowing how to use technology. This could impact my teaching because even though I personally don’t want to use that much technology in class and I would never expect my students to use technology at home, I may not have that much say in just how much technology will impact my lessons and the students’ assignments. One of the biggest problems that would arise would be that they wouldn’t know how to use technology or a specific software if we used it in class, but I would make sure I would teach all my students how to use the technology they would be required to use. I would try to make sure that no student was at an advantage and I would try my best to minimize a digital divide in my classroom.

An academic software tool that I would like to use in my classroom would be Duolingo which is an app that helps people learn a language through activities, mini lessons, and quizzes. While I am not proficient in any other language, I think it would be very beneficial for my students to know the basics of another language, such as Spanish or French. I could use this software to help my students learn basic phrases and sayings, colors, and animals. Another academic software tool that I would like to use in my classroom would be the BrainPOPjr app. This app would allow for my students to watch educational videos about science, math, reading, and other subjects. Personally, when I was in elementary school my teachers would show us BrainPOPjr videos and I really exceled in some lessons because of the information in the videos. Depending on the technology I would have available to me when I am a teacher, I could download both applications on smart devices or I could use the websites.