Blog Journal #6

I chose to visit Sabal Palm Elementary School's website. They did not have much information posted for the public. They had a school/district calendar with important events and days without school. They also had a few newsletters from previous semesters on there that was open to the public. There were student, parent, and faculty/staff links that required a login in order to see the information. I attached a screenshot of the website with a view of the calendar. This school site was for the entire elementary school and did not allow for me to see individual grade pages unless I had a login.
Sabal Palm School Page

The digital divide can greatly impact some student's performance in the classroom. Many students do not have access to technology at home, so when they are required to perform certain activities using technology, they usually need to have a basic understanding of technology first. Just like in the video from this week's learning materials, some students struggle when it's test time if the test is on the computer because they are not super familiar with computers due to their SES and lack of materials outside of the classroom. Schools in low income areas may also not have much access to technology, so those students may never get the chance to learn to use it until they are much older and are expected to know how to use it. If this issue were to occur in my own classroom, I would want to make sure and take the time to explain the basics of how to use whatever piece of technology it is to the entire class. Then, if students still needed some extra help or maybe don't have access to do their work on a computer at home, I would try to make accommodations for them and help them out in the classroom. 

I have been following a bunch of education pages on twitter and it's really interesting to see the kinds of things that go on that bigger news companies never really talk about. There are also so many teacher that interact with each other on twitter and share plans and classroom stories and it's really cool to see. Something like that would be really helpful in my own future career, even if it's not in education. It's nice to know that you can talk with people who are going through the same thing on a daily basis.  I have found twitter beneficial to parallel the information we have been learning in this course so far this semester. 

This week I commented on Malyce and Kemory's blogs