The case studies on this website show how numerous schools and educational policy-makers are attempting or have attempted to decrease the current digital divide for learners, both overseas and in our own backyard, in order to allow low-socioeconomic learners the access they need to fully engage in the global digital information age.
Overcoming the “first digital divide” requires schools to ensure that their students have physical access to ICTs. Strategies employed by some New Zealand schools follow the ‘cluster’ approach, providing access to improved procurement for purchasing hardware and software solutions as well as other community infrastructures necessary to ensure learners have access to the Internet outside of school. These solutions rely on community engagement which helps to shift sometimes negative attitudes whanau may have towards technology use.
While increasing learner access to technologies goes some way to bridging the divide, it is not enough by itself to fully fix the problem. Yes it does mean students have technology at their fingertips, but it does nothing towards ensuring learners use the technology effectively to improve their educational outcomes. To achieve this end, schools need to ensure that their teachers are able to use appropriate technologies effectively. This means ensuring that teachers are well-prepared to integrate technology into the learning environment, depending on both the development of their own skills with using the technology, as well as rethinking and re-learning pedagogical approaches which may seem quite foreign to them. Training a teaching workforce for such a dramatic shift in their modus operandi requires buy-in from not only the teachers, but also their leadership and wider whanau and learning community. Arguably the “second digital divide” is the most important to overcome because without tackling that, no amount of technology in the classroom is going to improve education; in fact it may perhaps have the opposite effect, decreasing classroom efficiencies and learning behaviours to the point where students are merely distracted by the affordances of the technologies and do not use them effectively to collaborate or problem solve. It is likely that this is the reality in many classrooms around the country where the first digital divide has been crossed, but not the second.
Summary of recommendations:
- Consider forming ‘communities/clusters of schools’ to access funding solutions through trusts which schools may otherwise struggle to access, cheaper procurement of devices and shared infrastructure (wireless etc), and collaborative professional development.
- Align your school with tertiary institutions specialising in education which can oversee research and development. Teachers should inquire and reflect on the effectiveness of the technology in improving students learning outcomes.
- Educate the wider school community on WHY you are pursuing particular educational solutions which involve technology.
- Ensure that the focus remains on education, not on technology. Educators should lead the conversations around how technology should be implemented.
- Provide meaningful professional development for teachers before introducing ubiquitous technology into the learning environment. Teachers must know how to use the technology so that students learn better with the technology than without it.
- Impel all students, especially low socio-economic learners, to move beyond mere users of technology, to further engage in meaningful applications through technology.
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If done correctly, crossing the “first” and “second” digital divides will lead to a redefining of teaching and learning in alignment with the vision set out in key documents such as Future-focused Learning in Connected Communities (21st Century Learning Reference Group, 2014) which sees equitable learning with technology as only one part of a larger list of requirements to ensure students are being prepared for life in the twenty-first century. Schools which have largely bridged the “first” and “second” digital divides provide all schools with the seminal materials and models which they can then use to do this for their own learners.
