TPACK Chapt 6 (Social Studies)

I found the chapter entitled "Toward Democracy: Social Studies and TPCK" quite interesting. For one, the chapter raised a few issues that I had never quite thought of before. The first issues that I had never really put into a complete thought is that social studies, as a discipline, doesn't really have a distinct shape. Yes, there are subtopics like the ones mentioned in the chapter, but the discipline is pretty all over the place. This must make it challenging for departments to cover the variety of standards and subject matters involved.

Another issue that I had never thought of is that social studies is pretty much just what the name implies. Therefore, if we are to study societies we need to integrate technology into this subject matter in a major way. We need to do this because the newest members of our society, the newest generation of citizens on this planet have been majorly affected by technology. Whether societies have been affected due to the presence of technology or because of its absence differs depending on its geographical and political location, I'm sure. But the fact that technology has changed the cultural, political, and economic picture of every culture on the globe is pretty much indisputable.

Just think about our last election. When declaring his running mate, President Obama had the world waiting for a text message. Truly. We were all waiting, with great anticipation, the arrival of a text message that would tell us the name of the person who would be chosen to become second in command of one of the most powerful countries on this planet. Brilliant! As for countries where information is not so readily available, how much talk has there been about google's decision to conform to China's censored web searches? How many of us have seen footage of monks protesting against Myanmar's tyrannical regime? These examples show the power that technology has on our modern global culture.

Some of the challenges in using technology in social studies classrooms are outlined in this chapter. The one that I find the most frustrating is the lack of organization of historical materials on the web. Maybe this is due to the fact that I am not a social studies teacher, but I find that I spend way too much time looking for pictures, documents, timelines, etc. when I plan history-based lessons using the internet. I can only imagine what it feels like to be a student with less experience searching for relevant materials. Because of this, I do feel like we all need to spend more of our time teaching technology-based skills explicitly. Students come to use from a variety of backgrounds and some have limited experience in using technology. Or, some students may have developed horrible habits when using technology, such as plagiarism. I find that many students who plagiarize often do not know that they have done so and that they have no idea how to accurately give credit to another's work and/ or ideas. Simply teaching students about basic research skills could prevent some of this problem.

Finally, whenever I read about the necessity of using technology with students in any of the content areas, my mind automatically shoots out exclamation points because I know that not every teacher has access to technology in the ways that he or she would like. I know of many teachers who would love to integrate technology into their lessons on a more regular basis but find that the technology we do have access to is either unavailable or an extreme hassle. In some areas of the school, a laptop cart is available whenever you need it and in others you need to plan weeks in advance in order to sign up to use one. Also, more money needs to be spent on professional development for teachers in technology integration. We have workshops and demos here and there, but there has been no money for workshops and district courses for the last couple of years. I took a district technology course about four years ago. It was filled with teachers at a variety of levels of experience and it was super valuable for me and for others because we got individualized attention. More of this needs to be made available if we expect teachers to integrate technology-based lessons into their teaching repertoire.