Blog Journal #4

My early experiences using Twitter were very vague at first. I made a profile and posted a few things in middle school, but wasn't quite active. Then in eighth grade, I began to use it quite often and would go on Twitter every other day. I began interacting with my friend's in middle school and followed many famous people online. I became super active into following the MAGcon boys, who were famous vines and I would tweet them all the time. I became a super fan! After my cringey middle school self became less involved in the MAGcon boys, I began to post my own singing videos on twitter. I found it beneficial because I gained the confidence to post my own content of music online and people actually liked it! Twitter will be helpful in my future career because I will be able to follow successful teachers and gain new ideas and resources from my colleges through Twitter.

The digital divide can affect student success in schools because since a lot of teachers assign homework that has to be done online; some students may not have these resources outside of school and lack the knowledge that the students who do have these resources gain. Some of these causes that create this digital divide may be the student comes from a low income family that cannot afford technology or a family that have strict rules about technology and the parents do not allow their young children to access it. To deal with this issue as a teacher I would give after school hours for the kids who cannot access the technology at home, and stay with them while they work on their assignments that are online. Also another way to help limit this barrier of the digital divide would to offer a paper based assignment that the students can choose between, so no matter what the student can do an out of class assignment. 

One software tool I would like to implement in my future classroom is Google Earth. This software tool is a program that you can type any address into the world and see where it is and what it looks like. I would like to implement Google Earth in the classroom because it broadens the student's minds into realizing that there is so much to the world rather than the small classroom that they are in. The other software tool I would implement in my classroom would be Tux Typing, a software that teaches young children how to type. I feel like many teachers do not focus on the way that children type on the computers and it really makes a difference for them in the long run. I have met people in college that do not know how to type correctly and it leaves them at a disadvantage when typing a research paper because it takes them twice as long to write one on the computer. Since our world is becoming more computer based rather than learning cursive I would like to teach my students how to type correctly.