Ensuring Equality of Educational Opportunity in the Digital Age

“Ensuring Equality of Educational Opportunity in the Digital Age” is an informative article about the use of technology or lack of use depending on many factors about ethnic groups and poverty-stricken schools. If we are to make all students in the United States have equal use and instruction of technology, we must be certain every school is funded equally. We must also address how ethnic groups and poverty cause a shortfall in the quality of education a student receives.

We must plan and implement teacher education to assure every teacher has the qualifications needed to provide technology instruction to the students. It will also be important for all students to have access to computer technology. It will be important not only to have access, but for the students to have an understanding how to properly use this technology.

The first key concept is addressing tangible inequities with topics of existing solutions and emerging solutions. Here they address the fact that if every student is to be able to develop the basic technology skills, then all the inequities that exist must be addressed and solved. They point out the fact that there is not an immediate solution to this issue. I feel we may not be able to solve the issue completely, but we must attempt to get as close to the solution as possible.

The next key concept is less tangible factors which include the topics skills and drills versus problem-solving approach, controlling students versus student control, integrated versus additive tool, classroom management tool, software limitations, and insufficient role models. There is a difference in how different social group use technology and how they are being taught by the teachers. Many times it is difficult for the schools to hire highly qualified teachers and, therefore, student learning suffers. This is particularly true in the inner city where many teachers are not willing to teach.

They also talk about how some social groups use computer technology as a servant relationship and some social groups use computer technology as the master relationship. We as teachers must work toward ensuring students learn to use computer technology as the servant relationship. This alone will improve how a student thinks and increase their creativity. Over time we will be able to increase how all social groups use technology for their benefit.