This technology-infused lesson uses the historical fiction book, Rudy Rides the Rails, which is based on the real “Ramblin’ Rudy” who rode in railroad cars searching for work during the Great Depression. Instructional development focuses on students working collaboratively as they...

This lesson integrates social studies, reading, language arts, and technology. Students are involved in reading historical fiction, examining authentic documents, and completing a WebQuest activity. Ten strategies for reading the Notable Book are explained in detail in the Appendix.

This piece is about how elementary and secondary social studies students participate in transformational social studies education for social justice through oral history. The exemplar oral history illustrated is through the life of an exemplary educator, Ms. Lillie M. H. Fincher. She was a...

Research has shown that middle and high school students, historically, have had a less than favorable opinion of social studies instruction (Hobbs & Moroz, 2001), a situation widely attributed to teacher reliance on textbooks, lectures, and worksheets (Protano, 2003). Today, this problem is...

Despite the recent interest and production of quality podcasts freely available online, there are relatively few podcasts available for K-12 teachers of economics. We see this as a missed opportunity given the real-time and real-world nature of economics. We have created the Econocast...

In Michigan’s state-wide social studies test, eleven-year-old students have been expected to defend or challenge a piece of public policy, citing a core democratic value in their written argument. In this study thirty-six fifth graders across three schools were asked to define a number of...

The recent focus on literacy in Social Studies has been on linguistic design, particularly that related to the grammar of written and spoken text. When students are expected to produce complex hybridized genres such as timelines, a focus on the teaching and learning of linguistic design is...

This article considers the current state of teacher discourse and reflection, situated in daily practice, craft knowledge, multiliteracies and new literacies. Based on studies of content area teachers' use of multiple texts in social studies fields like economics, the authors profile Kenneth, an...

In such a diverse society, some have suggested that teachers use primary source documents to increase history knowledge and build historical thinking skills. These calls come from a myriad of works that have been critical of textbooks. While these concerns may be appropriate, textbooks are still...

This paper represents an overview of our journey utilizing and integrating technology in the social studies context. We describe and explain our initial efforts that used Web 1.0 and then trace our development to our most recent project that incorporates and capitalizes on Web 2.0 technologies....