Education World looks at the digital divide and what it means to educators. You've heard about the digital divide. Everybody's talking about it. Journalists condemn it. Government leaders scramble to close it.
Educators struggle to cope with it.
The digital divide, in brief, is the gap between people who have access to computer technology and people who don't. It appears that, even as record numbers of Americans go online, the gap may be growing. The divide does appear to affect black and Hispanic households most. In addition, whites are more likely to have access to the Internet from home than blacks or Hispanics are to have access from any location. A survey conducted by The Public Policy Institute of California found that even in California, a hot bed of technology, only 39 percent of the state's Hispanic people accessed the Internet compared to 65 percent of white people.