Equity & Citizenship Advocate

I’d really like to address the “digital use divide”. Before reading the article, When did ‘Sage on the Stage’ become ‘Weaned to the Screen’?: Instructional Implications of the New Digital Divide, I knew that some students can effectively use technology to make meaning in their education while others struggle to do so, but I never really thought of it as its own digital divide. Five years ago, I had to sign out a laptop cart to have my students do anything with the internet. The year before that, I had to sign up to take my class to the computer lab (and be frustrated if it was already booked). I didn’t assign homework that required use of the internet. Fortunately, in 2019, each of my students uses a Chromebook as part of my school’s 1:1 program. I’m careful to assign internet-dependent homework, but given the amount of time in school that students have to complete their work, I never feel like I’m breaching an access issue.

What’s more obvious to me is that there is a divide separating students who can clearly use technology productively in their education and students who can really only use it to consume media. It’s also clear to me that technology is not going away and will be an essential part of most careers. One of the performance indicators I assess in my class is “use technology and digital media strategically and capably”. I ask my students to think about which technology tools are best for the what they are trying to communicate. I ask them to choose a tool that they think is best for them (based on a variety of options I offer). I’ve also offered little full-class support on how to use these technology tools in hopes that they would get more out of the process figuring it out for themselves (though I do help individual students who need support). I think this is the first year where I’m starting to be more purposeful about aligning technology use with course objectives, but I think I can do better. Given how I constantly switch up my curriculum, it seems I have the opportunity to continually work on this.