Blog Journal #5: Twitter, Digital Divide, and Academic Software

While I have held a personal Twitter account since early 2014, I never considered the more professional side of the social media platform. Since beginning my educational/professional Twitter account I have interacted with several different educational accounts such as FSUEducation (@fsueducation), Teacher2Teacher (@teacher2teacher), and WeAreTeachers (@WeAreTeachers). The FSU education account tweets about different opportunities for FSU education students to further their education, the successes of former students, and other College of Education events. Their most recent tweet was a call to any prospective graduate level students to tune into a Zoom interesting meeting for FSU's graduate school. As I have been contemplating graduate school for some time, I found this very helpful. The other accounts provide resources, articles, and sometimes just humorous posts to help educators in their day-to-day lives.

The digital divide is a term used to describe the disparity in ease of access to technology between groups of people or, in this case, students. Students who are either affluent or in easily wired areas, or both, tend to show greater confidence when learning new technology skills as they have had technology in their homes and at their fingertips all their lives. Students to whom technology is unavailable are therefor disadvantaged as they are less acquainted with technological programs and require more time and training to catch up with their fully wired peers. As a classroom teacher in a world where online resources have become ubiquitous, it is critical I assess early on in the school year which students do and do not have access to technology and the internet.

One of the most widely used softwares is Microsoft Office which is comprised of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. I believe there is, at this time, no better software for students to learn that will assist not only in their K-12 and college educations but also in the professional sphere. Word is utilized for word processing--typing and editing documents; PowerPoint for creating slides for presentations; Excel for the creation of spreadsheet to organize data. For more collaborative works, I would teach and recommend Google's spin on Microsoft's Office programs. Google's Docs, Slides, and Sheets are each equivalent of Word, PowerPoint and Excel but more easily shared and even edited in real time between team members. Google's house of programs is relatively new when compared to Microsoft Office but has rapidly spread through classrooms due to its more collaborative nature.