I'm hitting a point where the digital divide is becoming painfully awkward for me in my teaching. In this case, I'm talking about students who have or don't have reliable Internet access at home and the difference between what we can do with technology in school versus out of school because the local department of education limits access to networking sites and electronic equipment.
Every March, my students read The Ear, the Eye and the Arm as a class as part of an in-depth study of the journey motif in literature (I blog about this here.) It is a 300-page adventure story set in the future that is much heavier on detail, description, and back story and is slightly less formulaic than some of the fantasy books my students read (e.g., Harry Potter).
I expected it to be a challenge for my students, and at this point in the year, most are hungry for it. This year, for the first time, I teach in a Collaborative Team Teaching (CTT) or special education inclusion class and get to collaborate with a wonderful special education teacher so that my students with IEPs get the extra help they need. Nonetheless, my CTT and I were worried about a few of our struggling students and wanted to come up with ways to support them without removing them from the whole experience. It's easy for us to help students read in groups during class time, but The Ear, the Eye and the Arm is simply too long to read only in class—we'd be reading it until June.
We wanted to create a way for certain students to listen to the story as they read at home. We found an audio recording on cassette available for order, but realized students today hardly even know what a cassette is, much less own tape players at home! When it comes to listening to music, our students are pretty much fluent in the use of mp3s, YouTube, and MySpace.
We decided to record ourselves reading the chapters using GarageBand and make the tracks available to students online. My CTT partner created a networking site for our class using Multiply.com. It's similar to Myspace, but with much less traffic and inappropriate content; also, the age limit is 12 years old. We figured that, for the students without Internet access, we could burn the tracks onto CDs.
Ready to demonstrate the site, we signed out the LCD projector and a laptop at school, only to realize that the site was not accessible through the school's Internet connection. We took still shots of the site at home to show to the students the next day, and passed out detailed instructions for them to sign up and access the site.
The kids were very excited about this, but only some of them have been able to access the site at home. Some have Internet access but needed help going through the steps of signing up, which of course, I can't help them with at school. I have helped some students by phone. For those that have entered the site, it's been great. They even seem to look at us teachers differently, with some kind of added interest or respect. They're creating their own profiles and commenting on each others' profiles and the reading! Comments create another level of class interaction that's based on academic work. Every comment is visible to me, so I can keep tabs on these interactions.
The problem is that so many students can't participate, and that seems unfair. Many students don't even own CD players, just mp3 players. And the craziest catch 22 yet is that … drumroll … students are not allowed to bring mp3 players into school! They get confiscated by school safety officers when they go through scanning. I do appreciate that students can't have their cell phones buzzing or headphones on during my class, and can't go on MySpace when using school computers. But it seems like we are cutting off too many valuable learning resources in order to keep kids "on task."
And when will we get to the point where all students have Internet access at home? I've spoken to parents about this particular reading assignment, and when I mention the audio option online, they sound like they've already heard about it from their kids. They sigh, "No, we don't have Internet right now," sounding almost ashamed.
Right now, this means children in my class with no Internet access at home do their reading homework the old-fashioned way. No big deal for most. But as we move forward, this divide is going to become more and more painful. I'd like to see the government step in and make Internet access free for parents who send their children to public schools and provide a laptop—or an easy, affordable pathway to getting one—for all public school students. Once this is the case, schools need to get with the times and create safe and attractive networking programs for teachers and classes to use.