NECC 2008 - Other notes from the ISTE Digital Equity Summit

Here are the rest of my notes from ISTE’s annual digital equity summit at NECC…

Discussions

• Wyatt Sledge, Forth Worth (TX) ISD, told me that the district just hired a dedicated technology trainer for its administrators. Awesome!

Expert panel

Lara Sujo de Montes, New Mexico State University

• Digital divide v. digital equity
• Divide = lack of access to equipment
• Inequity = lack of access to benefits of learning and using that equipment
• Digital inequity reproduces existing social and socieconomic inequities
• The Internet is 2/3 in English but only 10% of world population speaks English
• Developing countries: rural, unemployed, uneducated farmers or unskilled wage laborers, subsisting on $1 or $2 per day, ethnolinguistic minorities
• Request distance learning courses for high school students, develop online materials yourself (even for a traditional course), install Moodle
  

David Thornburg, Thornburg Center

• Digital equity and space exploration as a STEM curriculum
• Half of workers at Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman will retire in the next decade; 15% of Boeing engineers are eligible to retire right now; we don’t have enough new people to replace them
• We need to go beyond teaching about STEM and help students see themselves in those jobs
• There is a lot of beauty and joy in STEM
• In prison they let you out early for good behavior. Schools don’t do that.
• I’m tired of corporations thinking of children as wallets with bodies.

Ashanti Jefferson, Chicago Public Schools

• Described some of the work CPS is doing with its kids

Al Byers, National Science Teachers Association

• NSTA Learning Center: significant gains in the learning of science teachers who participate in its online learning modules
• Teachers must have a voice in their own professional development if we want to see positive results
• If you include elementary and middle school teaches (who teach science but don’t think of themselves as science teachers), there are 2.1 million science teachers in the USA

Discussion

• Thornburg: Students in affluent schools use technology in creative, innovative ways. Students in disadvantaged schools use computers for decontextualized drill-and-kill exercises.