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Infusing several pieces together
The key idea with this vision is to use computers as a platform to strengthen historical content by infusing analytical skills, and writing skills with technology. By piecing each part together they all contribute to strengthening student understanding. Instead of passively acquiring the teacher’s or book’s point of view students will experience history from a diverse point of view through audio tracks, pictures, videos, and written accounts found online from sites such as the Smithsonian Museum or Library of Congress. Students will use programs such as gapminder to assemble data for observations of continuity and change over time. The technology can bring historical people alive by creating an empathetic feeling using oddcast to generate a historical individual. This assignment requires lots of creativity because students can then synthesize a script of what that individual might have said in regards to certain topics. Mind mapping with webspiration can help students better organize ideas so that they can see relationships between historical ideas and developments. Students can compose visual aids for arguments that they must present to the class.
All of these assignments would then be linked to the big picture in a student’s individual blog. Students will explore the central meaning assignment. For example, what values does the information convey? How does the information represent a continuity and/or change over time? What is your opinion about these developments? What does the development say about humankind’s or the U.S.’s nature? To illustrate the students point they can even post a picture from an online database, embed a movie from Youtube, or create a link to a historian blogger’s opinion. This will help to build a strong understanding because of the immense network of diverse information. Even better, students will generate ties to a global digital community that could reach far beyond the classroom walls. This video shows the power of blogging in the classroom. Check out the class blog here.
None of this vision would be possible without daily access to computers. With the limit to computing resources teachers are not able to let students play and explore the digital resources that strengthen pedagogy and content knowledge. Exploring blogs, creating mindmaps with audio tracks or videos, reflecting on the bigger picture, producing videos, would all fall by the way side. With current resources teachers are limited to computer access to just a couple days each month which makes using the technology very difficult because students do not get enough time to familiarize themselves with the possible applications. Creating a lifelong global information network would be another impossibility without the computer availability because students would not have the connection to these global resources.
With consistent access to a one student to one computer ratio social studies education will be revolutionized. The cheap availability of so many computer applications that help develop student’s thinking about the historical content cannot be matched with traditional resources. Furthermore students will depart with several practical skills involving both technological skill for the work place and an understanding of identity through history.
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