Barriers to access 3.1.1

Continuing the hopefully thought provoking ramblings... The digital access maps for our area say that the county has 100% coverage. While that may be true I feel that many of our students are still in the dark ages of technology. We have high schoolers that come and don't even know how to check their email. They are not aware of muich more technology other than gaming and texting. I think that due to the area and socioeconomics of our area there are students that are still without Internet access at home. They might ahve data and cell phones but they truly don't have technological access. Parents at times aren't educated in technology and therefore don't see the importance of making technology available in homes. Many of the students come from extremely blue collar working families. That being said, it's not necessarily a negative. It's just the culture of the area. We as teachers fall prey to that culture at times and feel that teaching technology as well as content to be a daunting task.

In these situations students can be resistant to learning the intricacies of how technology can improve their lives. I think that teaching them the advantages of technology can be tricky because we sometimes need to be reminded that technology can't takeover our lives. I think the key is to teach these students the benefits of using technology to make improvements to what they already know.

A major barrier to student access to the web is that many students in our area don't have technology or Internet access to them at home. One way our system is trying to combat that is gradually going to one to one with chromebooks.