Here are the rest of my notes from ISTE’s annual digital equity summit at NECC…
Discussions
Wyatt Sledge, Forth Worth (TX) ISD, told me that the district just hired a dedicated technology trainer for its administrators. Awesome!Expert panel
Lara Sujo de Montes, New Mexico State University
Digital divide v. digital equityDivide = lack of access to equipmentInequity = lack of access to benefits of learning and using that equipmentDigital inequity reproduces existing social and socieconomic inequitiesThe Internet is 2/3 in English but only 10% of world population speaks EnglishDeveloping countries: rural, unemployed, uneducated farmers or unskilled wage laborers, subsisting on $1 or $2 per day, ethnolinguistic minoritiesRequest distance learning courses for high school students, develop online materials yourself (even for a traditional course), install Moodle
David Thornburg, Thornburg Center
Digital equity and space exploration as a STEM curriculumHalf of workers at Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman will retire in the next decade; 15% of Boeing engineers are eligible to retire right now; we don’t have enough new people to replace themWe need to go beyond teaching about STEM and help students see themselves in those jobsThere is a lot of beauty and joy in STEMIn prison they let you out early for good behavior. Schools don’t do that.I’m tired of corporations thinking of children as wallets with bodies.Ashanti Jefferson, Chicago Public Schools
Described some of the work CPS is doing with its kidsAl Byers, National Science Teachers Association
NSTA Learning Center: significant gains in the learning of science teachers who participate in its online learning modulesTeachers must have a voice in their own professional development if we want to see positive resultsIf you include elementary and middle school teaches (who teach science but don’t think of themselves as science teachers), there are 2.1 million science teachers in the USADiscussion
Thornburg: Students in affluent schools use technology in creative, innovative ways. Students in disadvantaged schools use computers for decontextualized drill-and-kill exercises.
