#4 Twitter, Active Learning, and the Digital Divide

On twitter, I have been interacting with both my classmates as well as popular twitter accounts. I have been able to see, like, and reply to the tweets of my classmates and the #2040fsu has allowed me to see answers from multiple users regarding the EME's twitter weekly questions. I have also been able to follow people's twitters that I enjoy and retweet some of their content. I have found it to be really beneficial and enjoyable because it feels more real time then something like Facebook and it distills information down to short character counts. I think that this could be beneficial as a teacher because it would provide quick access to educational content as well as allow you to be up to date on current information and trends.

The digital divide is the gap between those who do and do not have access to technology. The digital divide creates disparity among students and the student with access to technology at home has a greater chance for success. Students who use technology within the school environment, taught and used by teachers, with supplements at home are better prepared for college or the work force. The digital divide can be caused by socioeconomic status, funding for technology within a school, and geographical access to the internet. As a teacher wanting to teach high school art classes, technology can be supplementary to my classroom teaching. Digital projects can be assigned during classroom time while homework can be focused on more traditional artistic methods. I can also teach my students in the classroom how to use digital artistic tools such as Photoshop or Illustrator so they would be prepared to use these if needed in their future work.

The software that I will probably be using the least as a high school art teacher would be productivity software. My class would not have many drills, word processing documents, educational games, or a need for an organization of a large amount of data since most of the student work is very hands on. The graphics software for active learning, including illustration and draw programs, would be my most used software. This type of software is directly related to my connect and would allow for students to move away from traditional artistic methods to newer digital technique development. I specifically would like to work with drawing programs or 3d programs with my students.

The material in the E-course can be really applicable to my work here as a student. I think that video conferencing tools and those that allow for live collaboration would be the most helpful because the issues that I find most common are often finding a meeting time and sending/saving work. As a teacher, the content can be used in the classroom environments. Saving work to the cloud will help prevent from losing student files and webinars might be a good option to use for a class with a guest lecturer. The importance of cloud storage resonated with me the most because I want to make sure I save all of my files off my computer because of fear of computer malfunction and the loss of large amounts of time and effort on school projects. I thought the activities were smooth and a good evaluation of the content. The only major issue that I faced was in the very last wrap up typed answers. I was trying to break up the information into paragraphs since there are multiple questions, and when I hit enter to do a line break, it automatically submitted it, not allowing me to finish my response.