Digital Divide/Digital Inequality

Below are the links to my presentation on digital divide / digital inequality.

VoiceThread
Google Doc Presentation

This weeks assignment was very beneficial to me.  I learned a variety of new technology skills such as VoiceThread and the use of Google Docs to make a slide presentation.  I have used PowerPoint in the past but Google Docs was a little different.  I find PowerPoint better as it seems to have more formatting tools from the multimedia aspect of making presentations.

In one of the readings for effective PowerPoint presentations it talks about using images sparingly.  I tried to do this but was confused as the exemplar given to us seemed to be almost all images of some sort or another.  I know that the presentation is narrated in VoiceThread but there must also be good information on the slides.  I think too much of anything - whether it be text or images or graphs - can really hinder a presentation.  I tried to use a variety slides to get my information across.

The topic of the presentation was on the technological issue of digital divide / digital inequality. Being that I am the Learning Leader of the CTS department in our school, I was well aware of the digital inequalities that affect our students and teachers.  However, I was not aware of the internet access issues in rural United States.  Since I am from Canada, I found it quite surprising of how much digital divide still exists in the US.  Of course, it is same in parts of Canada, but, nonetheless, it surprised me.

From a leader's point of view, it will be important to get teachers on board with all of the new technology that is out there today.  It is important to give teachers the confidence to use this equipment.  I will design professional development activities that are relevant to the courses and technology they use. As a teacher, I will definitely get more acquainted with VoiceThread in the future.  I will try to create better tutorial presentations with this technology.

This assignment took me a long time with the learning of the new technology and reading most of the articles.  If I had more time I would like to find more research on the digital divide issues in Canada. I would like to get concrete numbers on exactly where in Canada that the divide is still an issue.

Overall, I found this to be a good week for learning.  I am feeling more confident in the technological areas of the course and now I can concentrate on the learning of important material that affects all of us.