Splicing the Divide

The part of this research paper that talked about the integration of popular culture and student interest stood out to me as being very important in this article. I think that this is true for all aspects of education, not just for integrating technology. If a student is learning about something and a pop culture reference is somehow used in relation to the lesson, then the student is more likely to relate to, and thus learn, the material. I also thought it was interesting to see that low-SES schools are more likely to use computers to drill or use a word processor, but the reasons provided didn’t seem to actually be what I have seen in my experiences in low-SES schools. Basically, the author says that students are parked on a computer to give them something to do to keep them from misbehaving. While this is very negative and may be true in some instances, I don’t feel that this is entirely the reason. Students in low-SES schools and neighborhoods are less likely to have as strong of an educational support presence at home than a student from a high-SES area. Because of that fact, students are coming to school less and less prepared every year and therefore need more practice. I have seen many students who don’t know the alphabet or even their name when they start school. Since these students need more remediation than their peers in high-SES areas, it stands to reason that this could be part of the cause for more students to be on computers doing drills. If a student doesn’t have basic skills then they are going to be hard-pressed to do some of the things that high-SES schools were described to be doing on computers. I am not a researcher so perhaps this really isn’t the case, but I can definitely speak from experience in a low-income school that provides education to a low-income area.

Mobile Learning

This article gives a lot of examples of mobile learning that could happen in a classroom setting. What I don’t think this article does very well is delving into the possible successes and failures of each example. While the end of the article does give some general ideas, everything is very brief. I think his ideas for critical success factors are decent, but perhaps ownership should be moved to a different category. In my experience, student ownership of their own devices has caused more issues than anything else, although that is mainly because we don’t have a BYOD policy at the school I work at. I could also see a lot of potential issues even if we did have a BYOD policy or a 1:1 ratio of school-provided tech.

Income, Race, and Class

I liked that this article did not focus entirely on the differences between each group but also talked a lot about the similarities. I also thought it was good that the article gave seemingly valid and believable reasons for why each group responded the way they did. One line stuck out to me as being important, especially as someone who teaches in an urban school, and that was, “Managing and monitoring social media use are secondary concerns.” It really hit home for me because I was never able to understand how parents could allow their children to use their phones in the way that they tend to, but no one had pointed out to me before the obvious fact that being in a low-income situation, those same parents have bigger concerns than what their child is doing with their cell phone. This article was definitely an interesting read.