school and technology

As I read the introduction for "Writing Space" and thinking about our last class discussion I started to wonder about how technology in the classroom is going to affect the students I used to teach. They were fourth graders in the Baltimore City Public School System. Most of these fourth graders were not sure how to use a text book, as they didn't normally use them in grades before. They were taught mostly up until that point with DIRECT INSTRUCTION. There weren't enough text books for every student in my class, let alone the whole grade and my fellow teacher and I had to share the books. So what will happen when kids are using the computer more and more in their classrooms as text books? Will the socio-economic gulf that is already wide increase? Will they be even more unprepared for college, and the "real world"? Is there a way to make this fair? I don't have an answer for that yet. BCPSS is already millions of dollars in debt and cutting corners every where they can. I don't think that this problem is limited to Baltimore, either. I know that other teachers I have spoken with in innercity schools have the same types of problems. So what do we do about that? To add to this, any child whose parents can are over the poverty level send their children to private schools in the area. Due to this, most of the students in the public schools are African American, since most of the people below the poverty level in B-more are. This of course, is due to the fact that they, too, went to public schools in Baltimore and were shafted on a good education. So then this suddenly becomes an issue of race as well. I believe taht using computers in the classroom will and is a good thing, but I am concerned that this gulf will widen and how that will affect society.

Just my musings for today...