Indigenous Issues in ICTs

Our lecture for week seven focused around issues Indigenous students have involving ICTs. Indigenous students are significantly behind other students with their progress in ICTs. It is important for us as future teachers to recognise this and come up with efficient strategies to bring all students up onto a similar level. This may be hard due to students having limited access to technology due to location and poverty. Students may have no access to technology due to living in remote locations or be unable to afford equipment like computers and Internet. It is time to start thinking now though, what we can do to help Indigenous students gain the skills and proficiency in ICTs they require in order to succeed in their schooling. Our current generation of students are living in a world that revolves heavily around technology so it is important that we all talk the same language.

As suggested in the lecture notes, a way to close this technological divide is to provide Indigenous content when as a way to encourage ICT usage in the classroom. By providing students with learning opportunities that are of relevance to them, it is more likely students are willing to give technology a go. Teachers have found, when they work closely with students, providing scaffolding to their learners, students are less likely to feel threatened by the thought of ICT usage. A challenge to all us educators/future educators is to ensure we are aware of issues in our classroom that affect Indigenous students using ICTs and then we need to continually come up with ways to support and encourage their use and development of them. What can you do?

The tutorial for this week made me aware of all the ‘little’ things I can do to my Wiki to create one that is most effective. Max suggested we do five main things. These include: using descriptors to describe any resource links to websites, using images on our pages, using bold to highlight key words, using hyperlinks and creating a glossary page. At this stage in my Wiki development, I am still learning how to do these things, but hopefully over time and with Max’s and my fellow ED3441ers help, I will be able to achieve these on my own Wiki.