Digital badge #1

Having worked in Title I schools, with as many as 85 to 90% of our students on free or reduced lunch, I was intrigued by the digital divide and technology participation gap discussed at the beginning of Chapter 1.  This means that it is even more important to expose these children to the newest technology in order to prepare them for the work force which is ever more dependent on technology even in what used to be considered menial jobs.  Unfortunately, in many areas, the very children who need to experience this technology in their school attend schools in areas with minimal funding for the most basic needs of safe buildings, excellent teachers, and day-to-day expenses, much less for the latest technology.  Add to this the lack of education for many of these parents, plus low family income, and these children come to school without experiencing the latest technological tools that children in families with higher incomes, with highly educated parents, just take for granted from a very early age.
Because of an incident my sister experienced recently, the statement that teaching with technology does NOT require using computers in EVERY situation, really hit home for me.  Bobbi is a registered nurse who became a teacher of Health Occupations in Hillsborough County.  The day she was being observed, she was teaching a hands-on lesson on how to make a bed with a patient in it.  The administrator conducting the observation marked her down because she was not using technology in her lesson.  After a heated discussion, the administrator decided to change her evaluation and to allow Bobbi to discuss how she used technology in other situations.  As teachers become more adept with using technology in their classrooms, we must make sure that administrators stay informed and stay on top of all the ways teachers and students are using technology--not just computers, not just for research, not just as a gradebook or for email, but ALL the ways technology is incorporated both in and out of the classroom.
When I think of all the ways technology is used today, I think back through all the stages of my career.  Beginning with chalkboard dust and purple ditto marks, progressing through overhead pens of all colors and "Xerox" copies, if you had taken snapshots of my appearance each evening, you could follow my "digital identity" as it progressed through over 30 years.  The scariest moment that I experienced as I moved into the technology age at a magnet school happened several weeks into the school year.  After pre-school training in emails and virtual gradebooks, I was eager to embrace this new world, and entered grades daily into the grading program.  The tech specialist stopped by one day and asked where my paper gradebook was; I was taken aback!  Then he asked what would happen if we had a crash or a glitch!  I immediately made copies of all my grades and began posting all grades in my paper gradebook and in my computer gradebook.  Being a math teacher, I also averaged the grades myself before checking the final grades on the computer, and began to play around with "what ifs"--if Johnny makes X on the final, what will his grade be?  When I became an administrator, I encouraged my teachers to experiment with new technologies in their classrooms, while not forgetting to use tried and true methods and materials when appropriate.