Blog Post #4

     My experience using Twitter so far has been interesting. I've mainly interacted with a few of my fellow classmates and some education related accounts. These interactions have allowed me to see different things involving education from other people's perspectives. As a future teacher, this will be helpful for me because it will help me keep an open mind about things and will allow me to see different methods I could use in my teaching. Different students learn more effectively when taught with different methods, and looking at these Twitter accounts can aid in keeping me up to date on new approaches I could use in my teaching. 

     The "Digital Divide" can impact student success in many ways. To begin with, not having access to the Internet, computer resources, etc. throughout their schooling can have a negative impact on their life after graduation. They will not have the confidence or knowledge to use the technology most people in their field will already have mastered. Also, by just not having the knowledge of computers it will put them behind as far as what they are expected to know coming out of school in today’s time. This divide may be due to the area the students come from or just the amount of income their parents bring in. There are many outside factors that can impact a student’s accessibility to computers. As a teacher, my hope is to make technology as readily available to all of my students as possible. I want to be able to teach them how to use technology and prepare them for the world outside of the classroom. This may be difficult with what I will be provided with as a beginning teacher, but my goal is to eventually have the resources of my own that will allow me to efficiently teach my students about technology. 

     If I were to teach at the high school level one day, the student software programs I envision myself using the most are all within Microsoft. Word will be the main software used in the classroom. I want my students to be familiar with how to type papers and reports online. This is a skill I feel is necessary for them to have mastered in order to be successful later on in life. In my classroom, I also plan to have my students use PowerPoint frequently. There are a lot of perks to using PowerPoint, especially when it comes to presentations. I think knowing how to properly work this software will help my students in their future careers and schooling. A third software that will be used is Excel. This is often the most difficult program to learn, but it can be very handy for students to know how to use. It will be especially useful for those going into fields such as accounting. This software will be one of the ones least used in the classroom because it is not as commonly used as others. However, I think it is important for the students to have general knowledge about it. Overall, teaching different software programs to my students will help in teaching them new skills and preparing them for their future endeavors.