Digital Divide

Lesson Plan

The digital divide is the rift between people who have access to the internet and those who don't. I feel that because of the way technology is dramatically improving everyday, the digital divide is beginning to decrease. The stress that the school system puts on teachers to include technology within the classroom is, in my opinion, a big reason as to why the divide is narrowing. People are beginning to use advanced technology at really early ages as opposed to what was happening just 20 years ago. When I was growing up in a small, rural town, technology was a luxury, but anymore, seemingly everyone has access to technology (especially the internet).

As I begin to start my teaching career, incorporating technology into my lesson plans won't be a surprise, it will be an expectation. Technology allows teachers the opportunity to help students learn how to discover things on their own. Instead of a student asking some random question and we, as teachers, may not be able to tell them immediately, we will have taught them how to find the answers to all of their potential questions on their own. There's going to be a learning curve, but everything in life does. The availability that we teachers can provide technology for our students is going to play a huge role on how our students perceive and are able to work with the new technology advances we experience on a daily basis.

Mind Mapping

Nebraska History Mind Map

Bloom's Taxonomy, I feel, is exactly what a mind map is presenting. A mind map indicates a specific idea or topic and Bloom's Taxonomy is all about the learning process of that idea or topic. Bloom's Taxonomy is about complete understanding of an idea and a mind map shows all concepts or ideas of a main, central idea, so when going through the steps of Bloom's Taxonomy, the learner would be able to completely understand everything represented on a mind map about that particular idea.

Both, mind mapping and Bloom's Taxonomy, can be used when dealing with instructional technology. A mind map can give a person a visual representation of what is being discussed as well as all aspects of that idea, so with instructional technology, a mind map may display various technological tools that could be used within a classroom setting. Bloom's Taxonomy can certainly be used in instructional technology. If a person, such as myself, does not have much experience with technology, we as learners need to go through the steps of Bloom's Taxonomy so we can appropriately and efficiently used multiple forms of technology within our future classroom.

Digital Citizenship

I chose to focus on a couple of key aspects of digital citizenship from the article we were given about citizenship. In the classroom, I can easily discuss these characteristics of digital citizenship by tying them to each child's citizenship within there own community. We could discuss the roles they play in their immediate community and tie those roles into their digital community. I can stress the importance of security inside the digital community by comparing it to situations in the physical life, such as personal information they do not openly share. If they wouldn't want to share information aloud to peers, they should know not to share information online with their digital community. We, as teacher, need to be responsible for discussing and modeling how to use digital media in proper and productive ways. We need to be sure that our students understand the usefulness of digital communities but we also need to be sure they do not abuse their privileges of being in a digital community. We all the advancements and dependencies our society has with technology, it is vital that we incorporate it into the classroom, but it is also extremely vital that we use the tools we are given appropriately.

Univeral Design for Learning

Pablo the Penguin

Stories created on bookbuilder.org qualify as UDL sources because of the features the internet site offers. With all UDL's, we are trying to connect as much material as we possibly can to all of the students in the classroom. This is easier said then done. In all classrooms, there are all types of diversity, so with things like this internet site we used to create our own story, we try to reach out to those different diversities. There's an audio feature that would be useful for people visually impaired, there is also a feature that allows the creator to translate his/her work into another language which would be awesome if you, as a teacher, were trying to help some ELL students within the classroom. The pictures are good for beginning readers of all diversities because it allows them to match what is being read to what is going on in the story. With all of the features of the story building website, it doesn't matter what subject is being discussed because there are many ways of adapting the reading to suit multiple needs that a classroom may have