By Russell North,
Graduate Student,
Master's of Educational Technology Program,
Boise State University,
2015

Before we begin to discuss digital divide and digital inequalities at my school, it is important that an understanding is reached about what those two terms mean. In "The Digital Divide and What to Do About It", author Eszter Hargitta wrote the following definition for digital divide: "The gap between those who have access to digital technologies and
those who do not; or the gap between those who use digital technologies and those
who do not understood in binary terms distinguishing the 'haves' from the 'havenots'” (2003). When viewed at the world level, it is easy to see that a digital divide exists between developed counties and developing countries. Of course, this should come as no surprise because of the lack of infrastructures and the propensity of higher poverty levels in the developing countries.

In the same passage, Eszter Hargitta, defines digital inequalities as "A refined understanding of the 'digital divide' that emphasizes
a spectrum of inequality across segments of the population depending on differences
along several dimensions of technology access and use" (2003). These differences may result from abilities to use the technology, or even the understanding of the technology.

Being a Department of Defense Educational Activity (DoDEA) school, Sollars E.S. has a unique population of students, teachers, and parents. Every student at the school is a family member of a United States military member or Department of Defense employee living in Japan. Due to the dislocation from the United States, approximately 99% of the base population has high speed internet conductivity in their homes with at least one PC or laptop. The one percent that don't have access, do so by choice, mostly for religious reasons. So digital divide is not an issue in the community.
However, as in almost every school, there are some digital inequality issues that are evident at Sollars E.S.

I was able to determine the first issue of digital inequality almost immediately after sending an e-mail asking my peers to complete a survey that I had shared with all them on Google Drive. One third of the responses I received were not from teachers completing the survey but asking questions like, "What is Google Drive?," or "How do I log onto my Google Drive account?." These responses indicated that although the teachers are being provided with technology to use in the classrooms, they are not being trained on the use of systems or programs.
Of the teachers that did complete the survey, approximately 55% claimed that they do not feel they have received proper training on the technology that is currently in the classroom. Specifically, the proper use of the interactive whiteboards.

To solve this problem more professional development is needed on the use of the technology in the classrooms. This could be accomplished in a number of different ways, one is to provide the training to a large group of teachers during the school's PD days. Another option is to offer after-school courses as CPE to the staff, this would provide the teachers with CPE credits and be funded by their tuition. A third option is to provide training materials that are readily available on the internet to teachers and allow them to use the school computers to train themselves.

The second digital inequality that is evident at the school is limited amount of technology available to the teachers. Each classroom does have a SmartBoard, four student computers with access to the internet, and a teacher computer. The school has two computer labs with 30 docked laptops each and 25 computers in the media center. While schools in the United States are implementing 1 to 1 Chromebooks or iPads, our students are still using PCs that take five minutes to log onto due to the computers' age.

Since this is a DoDEA school, we are funded solely by the Department of Defense. This has some benefits and some disadvantages. One benefit is that the Department of Defense's total budget is mind boggling. But on the other hand, the school system is fighting for scarce monetary resources against the military branches.
Fortunately, the DoD does understand the importance of technology and knows that the students of the DoDEA need those skills, which means the school need them so would allocate the funds for more advanced technology. However, the next issue that is causing digital inequalities within the school may be a reason the DoD wouldn't approve the funding of the current technology and that is.......

Security!!! Since our school's internet connections are routed through the Air Bases servers, we have to follow the procedures and protocols of the base. The security settings that are throughout the entire DoD are so stringent that flash drives are not allowed to be connected to any DoD computer. Nor can tablet's, smart phones, or laptops that are not from the DoDs inventory. The filters placed on our computers also block many useful and educational sites.
These protocols are in place to protect matters of national security and are not easily ignored.

The solution to this problem would be to utilize separate servers for the schools and the base military computers. This would allow the use of more apparatuses and access to blocked websites and content that could be beneficial to the students' education.
By utilizing two different pipelines to access the internet, national security will still be protected and the students may be able to connect to the internet using a school provided tablet.

After reflecting on the digital inequalities at my school, it became obvious that action needs to be taken to reduce the amount inequality from both amongst the staff at the school and the school compared to other schools in the United States. These problems will not get resolved overnight but if no one takes action, they will never go away.