Blog Journal 4

I haven’t had any early experiences using Twitter before enrolling in this class, since the social media tools that I do actually use are only Instagram and Snapchat. However, now that I am using Twitter, I’m starting to get the hang of it by tweeting, retweeting, replying to tweets, creating threads, and following others. Lately, I have been interacting with my classmates as well as other students who are in this Introduction to Educational Technology class. I have found it beneficial by reading the experiences they go through during this class with the assignments they are completing that are similar to mine. Twitter might be helpful in my future career by possibly using this same method for the students I will be teaching to allow them to communicate with their peers in the same manner.

The digital divide is a term used to explain the great differences between students who don’t have the same accessibility to technology. The digital divide affects student success in schools in many ways, with one of them being completing school work. If certain assignments require using technology that they are not able to reach, this can hinder their possibilities to succeed academically. Some causes of the digital divide may be if a student is a minority who comes from a very low-income family that doesn’t have the opportunity of being supplied with the technology they might need. As a classroom teacher, I may experience having a student in this situation; this will affect my teaching strategies by allowing me to take note of the adjustments that need to be made in homework assignments for example that would be advantageous for these specific students.

There are many academic softwares that are available for students to use and be engaged with during their learning process. One of the many software tools I would like to use in my future classroom is Google Classroom. This is a tool created by google to aid with communication between teachers and students, and I would like to use it with my future students because I’ve experienced how helpful it has been for me while I was in high school. Another tool I would like to use with them is Kahoot, which is a game-based learning tool where questions can be created for students to answer for reviewing purposes. I would like to use this tool as well because of the playful aspect it incorporates that would get my future students interested in learning.