Esteemed School Board,
In our school district there is a digital divide amongst our clientele. To further explain, this would be the differences in our families that do have access to the internet and a computer as opposed to those who do not have this access. There are many reasons for this disparity. The basic reasons would be level of income, level of education, age, race, skill level, and or location in regard to the internet. This digital inequality could cause our students to be ill prepared for college or the work force.
One segment of our community that might not have access are Hispanic families with limited English skills. A sight that we could include on our school website to assist these families is www.learnenglish.de/. This site has a myriad of places to go within the site to help the English learner. It has grammar, writing, reading, stories, and pronunciation guides to name a few.
Another area that would lessen the digital divide would be more computers in the district. A way to free up monies would be to apply to Universal Service Administrative Company (www.universalservice.org) for assistance with our internet access. This would allow us to spend that money on more hardware for student use.
Additionally, www.on-tech.com/erate/ is the website for e-rate. This site discusses in detail how to become eligible for assistance with almost all telephone services (local service, toll calls and long distance), Internet access, and digital lines. Again the service would free up money for computers and other technology needed by our district to keep up with the constant changes in our electronic world.
Due to our rural location many don’t have access to the internet; www.wildblue.com is an affordable solution. This is a company that helps solve the access problem. It is also a fairly inexpensive way to connect to the internet. It involves a monthly rate, often with special promotions for the installation.
Another website that we could provide on our school site or newspaper is members.aol.com/shobansen3/. As an outreach to our seniors in the community this site is an excellent tutorial on how to use a computer. Possibly, we could then combine our older citizens with the younger ones and they could become e-pals.
A helpful website for those without the internet and or the necessary skills to manage the internet is www.nationalserviceresources.org/service-activities/community-technology-programs. Here a patron is offered valuable hands-on instruction, expertise, and guidance in schools and community centers, to low-income populations, and to the elderly.
My recommendation to the board is to address the digital divide that we have in our community. Offering ways to free up money to our schools, to help people connect to the internet, to learn the computer, and to learn English will enhance our community relations and help parents better relate to the school and possibly their child. In providing these sites on our school webpage this will allow easy access to our clientele. In addition, we should advertise these services in our local newspaper for those interested. Possibly our high school students could implement a community tutorial one Saturday per month to help those struggling to get ‘online’. This would also help those students complete their community service hours.
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8 comments:
Ruth I like how you tailored your objectives of your plan toward lessening the divide in your district. It seems like you really took a large portion of the demographic into consideration.
In particular, I like your ideas about connecting senior citizens to technology as well as providing good access for Hispanic families.
Your suggestion about high school students holding a community tutorial is one that we could use in my school district. The implications of this type of program could be very far reaching for all parties involved! Imagine the walls that it could tear down—--not just in bringing down the digital divide, but also the divide that exists between generations. Both parties have so much to teach and learn!
Ruth, great ideas. I know e rate has helped our poor, rural district a lot. One concern I have with some of your suggestions however is that they may be difficult for those without a computer to take advantage of. For example your idea for the Hispanic population is great, except that you state in the opening sentence of this paragraph that they may not have access. We have this same problem in our community. There is a lot of great help on-line if we can get them access.
I agree with the other posts. Having students host a "Saturday" clinic would be beneficial to both parties involved. Thank you for providing informaiton regarding rural communities. I am from a small area who is getting ready to loose their funding for many programs. I think that this just might help. Thanks!
Shaun, I agree about patrons without computers. I was hoping that the Saturday tutorials would help. Also putting it in the paper would help get the word out to that sect of the community. Thanks for the input.
I think you did a good job on the assignment, but reading it to me seems like you addressed how to gain access to more technoloy, rather than how to implement it. I know you mentioned the high schoolers putting on a tutorial, I think that is a great idea, but I personally think it would need to go deeper than that.
With the exception of the website that you mentioned for those who are not internet-savvy, you said nothing about any kind of training. If I bring in someone from a poverty-stricken family, hand them a laptop and a lcd projector, what are the odds they could hook it up correctly, and figure out what to do on the computer to get the image to project? Just a point I wanted to make.
Your other ideas are great, and I'm not trying to be a jerk or anything towards you, I obviously had to make a post and I wanted to be as constructively critical as I could be without coming off as a complete pompous ass.
It seems that you worked hard on it, and I will say the ideas you came up with were great.
Point taken, Bob. I guess I was thinking before any learning can happen there must be a desire to learn. I am assuming that the clientele would gravitate to offered training either from family (ie current students) or the school.
Ruth .. nice job, I like the "Saturday School" idea as well as the e rate suggestion, I think both of those would have a positive impact.
Ruth, I like the how you addressed a different topic than most of us. The majority of digital divide posts have concentrated on the socioeconomic gap within technology. I think with the growing populations of hispanics in the country language barriers are going to be more of a factor. Teaching in Poland I get a little taste of this. Although I am at the American school we get many Korean and Polish students who have not mastered English yet.
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