The Digital Divide of Use - Promising Practices to Close the Gap

In week 5 of EDUC 5353 we are asked to select a couple of promising practices we identified in our literature review to help close the gap we identified for our community.

I've selected the Digital Divide of Effective Use of Technology by Teachers and Students to focus on during this course. During the literature review, there were many promising practices identified, but here I will focus on the two I feel have the best fit for my community: 1) the "Hacking Leadership" framework developed by Zoller, Lahera, & Jhun (2009), and 2) the 2017 National Education & Technology Plan (NETP).

The Hacking Leadership framework has promise for our community because it will allow teachers and students to have a local impact on our own community while developing connections with community members and each other. They will learn to take all of the ideas that are presented and consider them from a variety of perspectives before deciding on a solution to be implemented. The NETP provides a great set of strategies to help connect the real-world learning of the Hacking Leadership framework with classroom content.

I believe the first steps we need to take would be to train our administrators and teachers on the NETP strategies and select a cadre to attend a Hacking Leadership training. Once the Hacking Leadership cadre has been trained, they can then share the methods they learned with the rest of the faculty. We can then use the Hacking Leadership framework to help each other best determine how to implement these strategies with our students and develop some lesson plans to try them with.

Our entire leadership team and all faculty members should be involved in this ultimately. However, it may be best to start with a few early adopter volunteers and a chunk of the administration and/or leadership team. We could ask one or two highly engaged parents to participate as well if funding allows. Once those participants have a good grasp on the strategies and how they might be implemented, the implementation plan can be rolled out to staff through professional development sessions - either in the summer, during the school year, or both. Once we begin implementing strategies it would be nice to receive feedback from teachers, students, and perhaps parents.

These are first-steps to be implemented in the hopes of increasing the effective use of technology by both students and teachers in our middle school community.

Citations

Reimagining the Role of Technology in Education: 2017 National Education Technology Plan Update [PDF]. (2017, January). U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved February 3, 2019, from https://tech.ed.gov/files/2017/01/NETP17.pdf

Zoller, K., Lahera, A. I., & Jhun, J. K. (2019). A model for addressing adaptive challenges by merging ideas:  How one program designed a hacking framework to address adaptive challenges and discovered the ecotone. Crossing the Bridge of the Digital Divide:  A Walk with Global Leaders, p. 95-112.