Bridging the Gap

The digital divide will be an ever-increasing gap unless today’s teachers fully embrace the technologies that are available to them. However many teachers may not like being less knowledgeable about a subject than their students; and this is highly possible in regard to online technologies. Considering this, are we expecting too much by asking teachers to use online resources and keep up with the tools of the future? Do we already expect so much when the task of a teacher is to provide an education; and we have already increased this load by demanding they take responsibility for social and emotional intelligence as well as academic success? Today’s teachers have every right to feel overwhelmed by the workload that seems to increase every year. But a pertinent question to ask would be; will the teachers themselves be left behind if they do not embrace technology as an educational tool for the future?
These questions seem to pose more questions and do not really offer much in the way of a practical solution that teachers can work through. So I thought I would analyse the benefits and possible detriments to using online resources as teaching aids.
Benefits
· Students are often more motivated to use technologies
· Enables extension of current knowledge
· Much easier to locate information
· Quicker
· Teaches critical literacy skills. Using the internet shows students that not all sites are useful and even accurate in their information
· Promotes deeper level of thinking when using blogs or wikis to ask for comments on thoughts and ideas.
· Encourages and promotes problem-solving skills
· Students are able to produce a professional looking document
· Visual information is much easier to read than linguistic – has appeal to a wider range of age groups

Disadvantages
· Difficult to supervise
· Equipment can be expensive
· Education Department firewalls prevent access to some valuable applications, tools and sites.
· Monitoring progress can be difficult if the teacher is not as experienced as the students
· Some teachers are reluctant to change from their tried and tested programs
· The cost is not always able to be covered by the school.
A part of the elective unit, “Using Computers in the Classroom” required us, in pairs to research one innovation and present it to the class in an effort to teach others how to use it and why this would be of educational value. This was then explained in detail in a wiki page. I feel that this is one way that this gap can be bridged, by teaching each other about technologies that are available online and learning from each other. This wiki page can be accessed by anyone interested in the innovations and has proven to be an excellent way of sharing our new found knowledge. All class members that heard the presentation were then required to write a blog explaining their understanding of the innovation and state whether they felt it was a valuable educational tool. This supported the wiki page well and provided the presenters with some great feedback from their peers about the value of technologies in the classroom.
To answer the question; how can we bridge the digital divide between those who know and those who don’t know? Sharing knowledge at every available opportunity is the best way to circulate this information। Always be open to learning about new innovations that may aid our teaching and experiment with them. But, importantly, new education students should be encouraged to take on a unit such as this elective to provide them with the knowledge of these new technologies. As more and more of us are educated about online resources, they will become more common for use in the classroom and our colleagues will see the benefits that they can provide in educating the students of today and the future.