The first part of this article that particularly stuck out to me was the short section on school access. The idea that students in higher socioeconomic schools have more technology than lower socioeconomic schools was something that I had heard of many times. This did not come to a surprise to me at all. What surprised me was the comment on giving newer technology to students in higher performing classes. This is an issue that I had never really thought about before. I was in predominately higher performing classes throughout my public school years but I did have a few “on-level” classes too. Looking back, I am now aware of this gap between technology uses. The only classes I ever got to use the school laptops in were my AP and pre-AP classes. This leads me to the question, why? Why would we give students who are already performing above the standards access to technology? Would it not be a better use of our time and technology to give this to students who are performing below or on par with the standards? The integration of technology into the classroom can be the difference between a student being completely lost on a topic to finally understanding something that they had been struggling with for a long period of time.

I’m also always interested in the topic of the generational gap. While I am able to stay current with the times as a young person, I wonder if 30 years from now I will still be able to keep up with my students and their use of technology. I think the fact that we are growing up surrounded by so much technology (and learning through technology!) is beneficial to us as future teachers. Seeing the benefits of technology in the classroom first-hand is an important step to helping bridge that generational gap between teachers and students.

The article Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21^st Century brought up quite a few interesting points that I had not heard of before and was surprised by. Henry Jenkins writes about the reasoning behind why we need to extend technology into the classroom of underprivileged students and how we can bring about the change in our classroom or school.

I was most intrigued by some of the statistics presented at the beginning of the article. He presented evidence that females are more likely than males to use social activities online. It might be because I am a female who loved blogging all throughout my teenage years, but this statistic did not surprise me at all. Comparing this to my life, I have noticed a pattern of more females using blogging sites and making more use out of social media sites like Facebook  or Myspace. I was also intrigued by the lack of differences in participation levels when it came to ethnicity. I had not ever thought about how race and ethnicity played into this scenario, but it seems to make sense that the use of online participation is an even playing field.

However, I was extremely surprised by some of the statistics that he provided about urban youth being more likely to create media than suburban or rural youth. The study was done in 2005 and left out a lot of variables, but the percentage differences between the three groups was surprising. I was left wondering, why would urban youth be the leaders in this group? If they are the group that is stereotypically left with the least resources, why are they performing the best? And ultimately, if they are the group that is already performing the best, are we doing anything to bring the suburban youth and rural youth groups to the same level as the urban youth?