Blog Post 4

   So far, I have been using Twitter primarily to read articles related to education and technology for education. I have retweeted several articles pertaining to this topic, and have used Twitter to find new researchers, bloggers, authors, and speakers that publish content related to the field of educational technology. I have mostly interacted with other students from this class so far, but plan on trying to reach out to more experts in the field using Twitter. In the future, using Twitter can be helpful to quickly get announcements out to my students after school, and it is a great way to contact educational and technology experts with any questions or comments I may have about a certain product, study, article, or other piece of information.
     The digital divide can very clearly affect how well students are able to do in school. If teachers and schools don't take into account the fact that many students still don't have reliable access to the Internet and other technologies, these students will fall behind and continually be behind his or her peers in terms of academic growth and ability to learn outside of the classroom. A main cause of the digital divide is poverty, so ensuring that all of my students know of the community resources available to them, such as the computers available at school and in public libraries, is key to stopping the digital divide before it becomes too great an issue for my students to overcome. If I know I am teaching at a school where the digital divide might be a frequent issue, I would make sure that my students have ample time to work on technology-based projects while in class, to greatly reduce or eliminate the need for my students to have access to advanced technologies outside of the classroom.
     When I have my own classroom of elementary students, I plan on primarily using technology to help my students with seemingly "basic" tasks, such as learning to type and using word processing software. I also plan on using student software to help my students learn how to read, answer questions, and look for different things in reading passages, such as the main idea, context clues, and how to draw conclusions and make inferences based on reading a passage on the computer.