Key Concept 6

6.1 Candidates will be able to model and promote strategies for achieving equitable access to digital tools and resources.

Equity was, perhaps, the most important and the most difficult topic we attempted to work with in this program. To be honest, as a school that focuses on cura personalis, I wonder if more attention should be given to equity and its concerns throughout the program, perhaps even with its own class. Even with this expansion of focus, however, it would be difficult for students to achieve a lessening of the equity gap or the digital divide, but we could at least prepare ourselves to try again in the future.

I present here a trifecta of artifacts. The first two complement each other, as they were companion pieces in Dr. Hunter's ED608 class. Our major project in this class was to choose an equity issue at our school and attempt to discover a remedy for it. As you can see in my report, I asked a number of WIBNI (Wouldn't It Be Nice If) questions to see what I could best influence at my school. What I eventually decided on was a project that would become an extension of an idea I created in Dr. Marcovitz's ET680 class, Personalized Professional Development. In Dr. Hunter's class, my WIBNI question dwelled on helping all students become more technology savvy and ready to wield technology skills in the real world by having teachers model and showcase more of the tools they would eventually need in their classrooms. This project lead me to my Internship, which promoted more aggressive and encompassing professional development that teachers could immediately use in their classrooms. After the report, you will see my reflections on the process of this project presented in a screencast diary format that I thought was a bit more engaging than simply another paper.

My third artifact is a submission to a forum on Equity and the Digital Divide in ET680. You can see my response, as well as posts from Lawrence Totty, a member of my cohort, and Dr. Marcovitz. This forum helped me focus my thoughts on equity and all the weight that term carries, which lead into my future work with equity concerns at MSJ and attempting to lessen them.