Throughout the Module 2.0, our cohort at Fort Lewis College has been looking at Technology Tools through the lens of the learner. One o the aspects that I repeatedly return to is equal access to devices. This article, What a Decade of Education Research Tells Us About Technology in the Hands of Underserved Students . directly examines this from an asset perspective, funneling the responsibility of technology use into the teacher's hands instead of the students, who may or may not be able to find time or resources to access technology.
The second resource our cohort looked at in this module was the National Educational Technology Report from 2017. Section 3 here lays out a report on the state of technology access throughout the country and provides a framework for how to use it most effectively. This report is comprehensive and highly applicable to my topic of choice. I examined an article from my PLN, edutopia.org, (found at this URL: https://www.edutopia.org/article/getting-kids-outdoors-technology) that described 5 helpful technologies that can be used outside the classroom. I love this idea because although most students in low income neighborhoods don't have the same access to technology as students in the wealthier parts of town, they still have access to the outdoors (one of the strongest tools science teachers have at their disposal) as well as access to smart phones. The tools outlined in the article are citizen science applications. For the most part, they involve students going outside, observing plant and animal species, and uploading photos to an app with a record of date, time, and other data. The result is that real life scientists receive the information, use it for real life science, and report findings back to the students. Zelinski's article outlines some of the familiar statistics about high school retention rates and then goes into the unfamiliar statistics about how these are correlated with technology. I think this issue is complex and it is important to realize that correlation does not equal causation. There are certainly other factors in play, such as the other parts of life that come with living in poverty. I did think it was an interesting point that they were making however. Near the end of the article, the author states,"If you are a student without access to a computer at home and limited access to technology within your community, you simply cannot engage deeply in the kind of tasks the literature recommends." They then go on to say,"To help our underserved students learn, we must eradicate all traces of the argument that access to digital tools is key to minimizing the digital divide, and instead advocate for changes in the use of these tools to better engage our underserved students in authentic tasks that support the development of higher-order thinking skills." I think that the distinction between having access to technology and engaging with it in an authentic way is important. It places responsibility into the hands of the teacher with respect to thoughtful lesson planning and task-specific design strategy. The second article was comprehensive and incredibly relevant. The first section set a goal for all students to engage in empowering and engaging learning experiences. I think we can all agree that going into the great outdoors and using technology to perform citizen science is both empowering, relevant, and engaging. This article also focused on using technology tools to create equity in the classroom, which I thought was a really interesting take on the subject because of technology's power to cause extreme division. Through the use of speech assisting technology, augmented reality, and other tools that exist within the same vein, students can come to have a more equitable access to the academic material in an engaging and empowering way. I have one student who needs to use an iPad to communicate do to his ability level. If he didn't have access to this tool, he would not be able to interact with the world on nearly as engaged of a level. When it comes to getting students outside using technology, I still think that the power lies in the outdoors and not in the hands of the technology. Teachers have the power to create engaging lesson plans that exist with pencil and paper instead of being tethered to the apps that my PLN mentioned in this article. I think that these tools can be incredible helpful, empowering, and engaging, but they are tools and should not be considered boundaries within which a lesson plan must be required to exist.
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