EDU 647: Social Education in the Digital Age (MSED)

This course is designed for students who already have an undergraduate degree in education and are working on their Master's in Education degree. It is a required course for MSED students who have a social studies concentration, but is also open to other education students who wish to take it as well. I am currently teaching this course online. Please click here to view my syllabus.

This course is "designed to prepare graduate students in the social specialization strand to become "wise connoisseurs" of social studies resources on the Internet. This course will also explore practical theory and research concerning teaching and learning social studies on the Internet while providing multiple experiences to use communication technology. Students will create an Internet resource guide for use in the social studies classroom" (from course catalog). When I began preparing to teach this course for the first time, I was provided with a sketchy course syllabus that lacked information regarding course objectives, student goals and assignments. I spent a considerable amount of time researching what content to include in such a course. I found that it is important to include elements of technological access throughout the course so I used a text called, Technology and Social Inclusion: Rethinking the Digital Divide by Warschauer (2004) to do so. This text provides some case studies on various communities throughout the world and has students begin to realize that access to technology hardware, software, education, and skills is critical to using technology in the classroom. Alongside this text, I used Social Studies on the Internet by Berson (2004). This text was used for this course by a previous professor and I found it to be a valuable resource to continue to use. To view a copy of my most recent course syllabus, please click here.

I begin this course with the students identifying how technology is currently being used in schools and classrooms where they're teaching. Through in-class conversations, I found that the amount of technology that is included in their daily teaching in elementary classrooms depends (of course) on their own background knowledge of technology. Perhaps more importantly, I learned that although students may have background knowledge about the importance of using technology to enhance their elementary students' learning, many did not have expertise with technology. Some students mentioned that they were still afraid to use technology while others mentioned that they didn't have time to spend on learning the information necessary to implement technology in their classrooms as often as they believed they should. It was at this point that I realized the importance of designing assignments for MSED students that can be directly applied to their own teaching circumstances. Students' qualitative comments on my CTEs indicate that they believed that assignments were directly applicable to their own teaching contexts; I'm very satisfied with that result!

One of the assignments that I created was to have students create Virtual Field Trips. Students needed to (1) identify a place where they wished their students could visit that would contribute to their understandings of current social studies content, (2) search the Internet for meaningful social studies content (narratives and pictures), (3) plan and create a PowerPoint presentation, and (4) present their work to our class as a Virtual Field Trip. For an example of a student's work, please click here. Students repeatedly mentioned that this was one of the most valuable assignments that they completed in the class because they could use it during their own teaching.

One of the other assignments that students mentioned that was very valuable to their own instruction was the Children's Social Studies Website Review and Analysis. This assignment facilitates students' understandings of the importance of the necessity of teachers carefully selecting websites for in-class use. Students began by choosing a children's website to evaluate by using criteria established by professionals at Cornell University's Library. To view this resource that I had students use, please click here. To view the assignment description and grading rubric for this assignment, please click here. To view a sample of a student's work, please click here. Through student responses to this assignment, I have learned that they didn't know much about analyzing and evaluating Internet resources prior to taking this course. I believe that this assignment strengthened their abilities to carefully select meaningful Internet resources to use in their own elementary classrooms.

Of all of the courses I've taught, I have found that this was the most difficult one for me to prepare. Locating a wide variety of social studies resources on the Internet was something new to me and extremely time consuming because I had to search for, analyze and evaluate the websites to use as resources for each class. I found that much of the content that I have learned from preparing this course could be applied to my own instruction in EDU 375. As I plan to teach EDU 514 in the future, I can also apply content from this course into its design as well. During the Spring 2007 semester, an adjunct faculty member taught this course. She asked me for some of my teaching materials so I provided her with all of my class notes, all assignment descriptions, all grading rubrics, and my course syllabus. She wrote a note thanking me for these resources. I believe that her course preparation time will be much less than mine was because she has these materials as a reference point for her own course design.

During the Summer of 2006, I created an activity for students in another course to use Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers to better understand how longitude and latitude coordinates can be used to locate every place on the world. I plan to modify this assignment a bit so I can incorporate GPS technology into this course when I teach it again. In the future, I have a desire to work with local elementary schools to implement GIS day.  GIS Day is one example of something that I learned about by preparing to teach this course.

During this spring 2010 semester, I am teaching this course entirely online. Although I am always eager to teach in an online environment, I still feel new to it and to the challenges that are inherent to its design. Please click here to view the way that I identified the guidelines for online class discussions and please click here to view a screenshot of the online environment. I found it rewarding to teach this course online because it still feels new to me. However, I've realized that I love teaching because I love the in-person interaction that comes with having students in a classroom alongside me.

Overall, I am pleased with what students have learned in this course (online and on campus). I believe that my most important professional knowledge that I've gained from teaching this course is to realize the importance of providing meaningful assignments that current teachers can complete and implement in their own classrooms.