Major Forum to Tackle Tough Questions on ‘Digital Divide’
The editors of the Journal of Teacher Education are pleased to be organizing our annual major forum for AACTE’s 68th Annual Meeting. This year’s session, “Equity, Access, and the Digital Divide: Challenges for Teacher Education,” will be held Wednesday, February 24, 9:00-10:15 a.m. (Be sure to add it to your personal schedule in the Online Event Planner!)
Our goal is to bring together representatives of stakeholder institutions and organizations to discuss how AACTE members, working together, might effectively respond to the challenges teachers face in using technology to meet the needs of all students despite the inequities posed by the digital divide.
For some years, the mantra of a diverse group of stakeholders—including educational leaders, technology- and media-focused businesses, policy makers, think-tanks, and community-based organizations—has been that access to high-quality technological tools is key to addressing the achievement gap observed in the United States and worldwide. But increasingly, questions have arisen regarding what technologically based tools really do make a difference, what context is critical for successful introduction and integration of such tools, what scale of implementation might be possible and, perhaps most important for AACTE, how to best prepare and support teachers to develop the skills necessary to make use of such tools in powerfully educative ways.
Please join us for a conversation that will challenge, inform, and prod us to (re)consider the ways we prepare teachers to support learners in multiple contexts. I will serve as moderator for the panel discussion, which will feature these four activist scholars, administrators, teacher educators, and media specialists:




For more information about the AACTE Annual Meeting, visit http://aacte.org/professional-development-and-events/annual-meeting.
Tags: Annual Meeting, equity, JTE, technology