Opening Doors, Opening Minds with ISTE’s SIG for Digital Equity
By Robert T. McLaughlin, Ph.D., SIGDE Chair
Larry Talbert, longtime IT manager for a rural California school district and a current SIG officer, believes strongly in making sure that all students, especially those who are most at risk, are given access to, and become engaged in, using learning technologies.
He describes a high school sophomore that his principal had asked him to interview for his new “technology intern” program. The principal said she had seen “horsepower” in the young man, even though all his grades were poor or failing. She hoped that becoming an intern might boost the student’s confidence and skills. When Talbert interviewed him to see if he should become an intern learning to assist teachers to use technology in their classrooms, the boy described himself as “a loser”. He described a broken and economically distressed family, with no one in his immediate family ever having gone to college, and with few expectations of a successful life ahead.
Talbert explained to him that if he became an intern, he’d have to be on time, dress properly, and get a C or better in all of his classes. In return, Talbert explained, he would learn valuable skills and earn the respect of his teachers and classmates—and he’d get to use technology. He became Talbert’s finest intern, eventually helping train and lead all of the district’s interns in his senior year.
Along the way, the student had to develop math, writing, and public speaking skills. He worked hard both to master the technology knowledge to advise teachers, and to bring up all of his grades. Why did he work so hard? Perhaps, Talbert feels, because he enjoyed working with the hardware and software, and was thrilled by being able to see something he did yield immediate results, results which others valued and respected. Learning technologies, Larry now believes, make it much easier to reach and engage many students who have become convinced they are incapable of academic success.
This youth was one of five finalists for the All Students Succeeding Award by the Association of California School Administrators. He went on to community college, was hired as assistant IT manager for the district where he’d grown up, and then helped administrator a nationally distinctive Teaching American History Project, assisting teachers in four states to integrate technology to invigorate American History instruction.
My colleagues and I in SIGDE (the SIG on Digital Equity) are committed to promoting the thousands of such quiet, understated yet life-changing ways in which educators are giving at-risk and other underserved students sustained access to learning technologies in hopes of engaging them, helping them build the skills and confidence they will need to survive and thrive despite the odds before them. Toward this end, SIGDE offers members a growing array of supports for learning about such strategies:
The Annual Digital Equity Summit is open to all ISTE members, highlighting both critical dimensions of the digital divide that educators in developing and developed nations face as well as promising strategies for addressing them. At the 1st annual summit held at NECC 2006 in San Diego, we explored issues and strategies related to inequitable student access to hardware, connectivity, and culturally responsive digital content, and participants began to develop personal action plans for replicating and promoting digital equity solutions.
Beginning at NECC 2007, SIGDE will also host an Annual Digital Equity Forum open to SIGDE members. Here we will delve in more detail into a full array of promising and proven digital equity strategies, then engage participants in developing action plans tailored to the most pressing digital divide challenges facing themselves, their students, and their communities. Volunteers will then moderate year-round threaded discussion among forum participants, celebrating successes, sharing resources, and problem solving when digital divide challenges emerge.
Since our ultimate aims in SIGDE are to assist all interested educators to learn about and successfully employ digital equity strategies–e.g., where to point low-income students to sources of low-cost or free connectivity and computers–we believe it’s essential that our global network builds a knowledge base making it easier for celebrate and learn about proven digital equity approaches and resources. In collaboration with the National Institute for Community Innovations, educators are encouraged to contribute to and use SIGDE’s growing knowledge base of proven digital equity strategies at http://digitalequity.edreform.net/.
We also provide members opportunities to participate in national and international digital equity initiatives. For example, we are now exploring collaboration possibilities with such groups as the Association of Teacher Educators, the National Staff Development Council, and UNESCO’s Global Task Force on ICT in Teacher Education, hoping to provide preservice and inservice educators with resources that strengthen their preparedness to spot obstacles to equitable technology access for students, and to know where to turn for high quality, free or very low-cost learning technology resources–so that, like the youth whose life Larry Talbert helped transform, all children can benefit from the bounties of learning technology.
I encourage you to join or volunteer with SIGDE on these important initiatives. Help us widen the door, together.
Robert McLaughlin is the current SIGDE chair and the president and founder of the National Institute for Community Innovations. For more information Robert can be contacted at mclaughb@nici-mc2.org or (802) 229-1742.
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