Template+Digital+Divides+and+Disconnects


 * Digital Divides and Disconnects **


 * Assignment Due 11/27/2012 **
 * Name: **
 * Week's Topic: **
 * Date: **
 * Site Name: **
 * Hours tutored weekly/total: **


 * Questions for the assignment: **


 * 1) How did you become fluent in computer usage? Were you self taught? Who or what helped you the most?
 * 2) Is self-teaching an effective method for students to learn how to use a computer? Is this method working anywhere that you have seen, inside and/or outside schools in the U.S. today?
 * 3) What surprised you most about the children's use of the technology in this film?
 * 4) Do you think schools ought to have a technology center in a school where students can engage with new technology and teach themselves? What do you think they might learn?
 * 5) Do you consider having access to the Internet a human right that will be increasingly important in your lifetime? Why or why not? Please reference each of the 3 articles below in your answer.

**Please make a list ranking** **these tools:**

Which technology tools and services would have the greatest impact on your learning? When Project Tomorrow asked students around the nation in its Speak Up survey (2009), here how they replied :
 * Communications tools || 60 percent ||
 * Digital media tools || 60 percent ||
 * Games and simulations || 60 percent ||
 * Online textbooks || 57 percent ||
 * Mobile computer for every student || 57 percent ||
 * Interactive whiteboards || 53 percent ||
 * Collaboration tools || 51 percent ||
 * Digital resources || 51 percent ||
 * Mobile devices || 51 percent ||
 * Tools to organize school work || 49 percent ||
 * Campus-wide Internet || 49 percent ||
 * Online courses || 48 percent ||


 * Reading Assignment Due 11/27/2012 **

TED video here.
 * Being fluent in computer usage means you have the ability to learn anywhere at any time. **
 * TED presenter,** Sugata Mitra, describes how children in India taught themselves how to use a computer.

** [|United Nations Declares Access to the Internet is a Human Right] (2011)**

** [|Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction] ** from //The New York Times//, November 21, 2010.


 * [|The ABCs of e-Reading] **. In a study reported in the //Wall Street Journal// (August 25, 2010), 40% of the purchasers of e-readers said they now read more than they did with print books. Of those surveyed, 58% said they read about the same as before while 2% said they read less than before. Some 11 million Americans are expected to own at least one digital reading device by the end of September, 2010.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES ABOUT THE TOPIC:

 * [|In Schools of the Future, Students Learn Best by Doing, Vigorously and Digitally] **.

[|Michelle Barker][| September 2, 2010 • 1:24 pm]

As a first year “computer teacher” for first and second graders, I found this article of great interest. Even with my little ones, I understand that teaching them “computer skills” is important. However, after being part of Will Richardson and Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach’s Powerful Learning Practices (PLP) last year, I felt compelled to create a poster with a quote from this article.

“Students are not learning computers; They are learning subjects using digital technology more effectively.”

With this being my 16th year in the classroom after having taught Pre-K through 8th grade, including Spanish, my passion is not in the technology. It is in the learning, inquiry and curiosity of my students. I laughingly tell people that one month ago I was a “teacher.” Suddenly I am a “technology specialist.” At some point I think that all teachers will also be technology specialists, especially considering that many of our students already are.


 * [|Timeline: Classroom Technology from Papyrus to iPad] **

[|In South Korea, the education system is going to entirely digital textbooks by 2015].




 * Researchers at the University of California Irvine found that youth engagement in nonpolitical online participatory cultures may serve as a gateway to participation in important aspects of civic and political life, including volunteering, community problem-solving, protest activities, and political voice.


 * [|Getting Attention in the Laptop Classroom] **


 * [|Orchestrating Technology as a Teacher] **, by Robert Maloy and Sharon Edwards from //On Cue Magazine,// Spring 2010.


 * //__Impacts of Technology Children and Learning__ // **

A 2004 report from the Alliance for Childhood, “Tech Tonic: Towards a New Literacy of Technology," indicates that giving children wide access to technology will produce uncertain results. Far too many children, the report claims, “spend hours each day sitting in front of screens instead of playing outdoors, reading, and getting much needed physical exercise and face-to-face social interaction” (2004, p. 1).

While middle and high school students need high tech skills, the Alliance urges an evolutionary approach to technology integration in children’s lives, organized around seven keys to a new technological literacy:

1. Make human relationships and a commitment to strong communities a top priority at home and at school.

2. Color childhood green to refocus education on children’s relationships with the rest of the living world.

3. Foster creativity every day, with time for the arts and play.

4. Put community-based research and action at the heart of the science and technology curriculum.

5. Declare one day a week an electronic entertainment-free zone.

6. End marketing aimed at children.

7. Shift spending from unproven high-tech products in the classroom to children’s unmet basic needs. (2004, p. 5)

Supporters of regular computer use by preschool and elementary school age children urge parents and teachers to choose technology carefully, but not eliminate it altogether. Open-ended, imaginative programs for young children can support exploratory play, promote imaginative thinking, and expand opportunities for children to practice needed reading skills. The key is for adults to avoid giving children electronic toys and software that are either too restrictive or too complicated.

[|Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier] from PBS.

[|Digital Youth Research]
“Kids’ Informal Learning with Digital Media: An Ethnographic Investigation of Innovative Knowledge Cultures” is a three-year collaborative project funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Carried out by researchers at the University of Southern California and University of California, Berkeley, the digital youth project explores how kids use digital media in their everyday lives. Download and read the two page summary of results.

=== [|Writing Technology and Teens] ===

According to a 2008 report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, “Teens write a lot, but they do not think of their emails, instant and text messages as writing. This disconnect matters because teens believe good writing is an essential skill for success and that more writing instruction at school would help them.” Student writing outside of school thus provides a platform for teachers to use to promote student writing in school.

__//Technology Use and Gender Roles//__
Drawing on interviews with more than 200 male and female computer science students at Carnegie Mellon University, Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher set out to explain why so few women pursue careers in computer science and related fields. Nationally, only one in five graduates of computer science programs are women while in high schools even fewer numbers of girls take courses in programming or complete four years of coursework in mathematics. At the base of the problem, noted Margolis and Fisher (2002, p. 2), are attitudes and behaviors grounded in the widespread “gender distinction ‘boys invent things and girls use things that boys invent’.”

Beginning in the elementary grades and continuing through college, technology, and the related fields of mathematics and the sciences, are seen as mostly a male domain. Kids entering kindergarten already have broadly defined assumptions about gender. “Every year, I have to throw the boys out the [wooden] block area,” one first grade teacher told us, commenting on the tendencies of her students to follow a gender role pattern of boys doing engineering and building projects with blocks and other materials while girls busied themselves with reading, writing and drawing activities.

In terms of how girls and boys relate to technology, a consistent pattern emerges throughout K-12 schooling: “More boys than girls experience an early passionate attachment to computers whereas for most girls attachment is muted and is ‘one among many’.” In middle and high schools, there is “a further increase in boys’ confidence, status and expertise in computing, and a decline in the interest and confidence of girls” (Margolis & Fisher, 2002, p. 33). Girls feel excluded from a mostly “boys club” and their academic interests shift in other directions.

Finding ways to encourage girls in technology is one way to create an atmosphere of gender-fair learning in your classroom. In interviews, women who majored in computer science reported they did well in a high school programming class, found computing came easy to them, derived pleasure from using technology, were attracted to the versatility to computing, saw technology connecting directly to their interests in math and science, and had a sense of a career path that was open to them. Also high on the reason of reasons for at least a third of those interviewed was encouragement from teachers (Margolis & Fisher, 2002, pp. 49-50).

Such research suggests that can be especially influential in how girls and boys relate to computers and other smart machines in schools. How you set up your classroom, conduct discussions, choose reading assignments, structure class interactions, and talk to your students about their interests can all have an enormous impact on how students think about themselves as learners and their goals as students.


 * Do you see students accessing computers in their classrooms or in computer labs for instruction in reading, writing, math, history, or science?
 * If so, are the girls and the boys doing the same assignments or are they utilizing different software and sites?
 * If you have observed math and science technology lessons, did these use real world data and focus on real-world problems and their solutions in ways that attract the interests of both genders?

I**NTERACTIVE LEARNING SITES**

=== **//__TinkerPlots, Software to Make Data Analysis Engaging for Kids__// ** ===

This software, devised and developed at UMASS, specifically aims to interest kids in using data analysis for their own purposes and questions. Just as SCRATCH was developed to put the power of programming and all of the math that this entails into an engaging, creative software for teaching children, Tinkerplots endeavors to achieve the same goal with data analysis. Read the information and view the movies about it. **You can TRY THE PROGRAM by USING IT on a computer IN FURCOLO where we have TEAMS.**

[]

[] **opens the movies where you can view, TinkerPlots Basics**.

**__//Getting Started With Scratch//__ **
Scratch is a programming language that is easy enough for kindergarteners to play with and challenging enough for college students and everyone beyond the age of 18 to learn. As an interactive activity, the language utilizes creativity and multiple intelligences first, appeals to both girls and boys, teaches far more than is obvious, and is a way for teachers to differentiate instruction with computers. Please view the video and consider its incredible usefulness for teaching math. **TRY THE PROGRAM either by DOWNLOADING IT or by USING IT on a computer IN FURCOLO, where we have TEAMS.**

[|http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvpZ23dx7hA]