Here are my notes from Doering, hughes, Scharber’s “Teaching and Learning Social Studies Online,” chapter 6 of What Works in K-12 Online Learning:

1. There are about 74,600 students nationwide who enroll in distance education utilizing computer technologies and then receive credit from institutions in distant locations.
2. Social studies is the study of the social sciences and humanities to promote civic competence.
3. The nation’s expenditure on technology has been a “black hole” with minimal return (Oppenheimer, 1997; Cuban, 2001).
4. Although the research on technology integration reveals little additional impact on student learning, the descriptive evidence of tech’s effect on student social experiences is strong.
5. The disciplines of social studies and learning technologies should work together, learning from each other, to establish the potential and best practices for technology in the social studies.
6. Authors provide a framework to highlight the range of technology resources available for integration and are integrated into social studies education in 4 ways:
   a) individual lesson plans distributed online that enhance existing face-to-face curriculum;
   b) online lesson enhancements that augment individual face-to-face lessons;
   c) completely online courses and curriculum where current face-to-face courses and curricula are supplanted; and
   d) an all-inclusive online courses, curriculum and online learning environment where depending on pedagogy, the online learning environment flexibly provides all 3 earlier forms: individual lessons, lesson enhancements and completely online courses and curriculum.
7. Teachers’ own pedagogy impacts their decisions in adopting and using the resources, which may or may not honor the online environment/curriculum’s intentions for the learners’ experiences.
8. Social studies teachers have most commonly accessed the Internet for individual lesson plans to assist them in teaching certain concepts within their F2F classrooms. Lessons in this category are typically found online; are used without adaptation; may offer authentic updated data also accessible on the web; and do not require students to do anything online.
9. Standalone lesson examples are available at Thinkfinity.org. This content is peer-reviewed, standards-based, and classroom-ready.
10. Online lesson enhancements (where students or teachers, or both, are using an online activity) come into play when teachers are teaching an individual concept or theme within an individual F2F lesson.
11. Teachers identify a small online activity–the enhancement–which they include as a part of a larger lesson.
12. Lesson enhancements can be placed into 3 subcategories that describe a learner’s involvement within an activity’s pedagogy:
    a) direct instruction: BrainPOP videos
    b) active direct instruction: includes online enhancements in which students are directing their own pace throughout the experience, but with limited acquisition or application of data. Students become motivated at this level because they are actively participating; they are self-directing the pace and the experience itself.
    c) constructivist instruction: includes online enhancements with which students direct their own pace, acquire their own data, and apply the data within the environment. That is, students decide what data they need, ask questions about the data, and use the data to analyze a certain situation. This kind of approach capitalizes on students’ use of tech for learning with a “mindtools” approach, engaging in Webquests to acquire information through online resources, and participating in multiuser virtual gaming environments.
13. During the 2002-2003 school year, approximately one-third of public school districts had students enrolled in distance education courses, which translates to an estimated 8,200 public school districts, or about 9% of all public schools nationwide.
14. Almost one quarter of these students are enrolled in social studies courses.
15. Recent research found that the wide variety of approaches to the curriculum, lessons and online tools adopted in each online classroom.
16. While students in various online courses evidenced meaningful learning, Kerr recognized that this might have been heightened if both teachers and students had made more use of the available technologies’ affordances for learning. For example, Weblogs (blogs) were a key component of one course’s learning model…students did not use blogs’ inherent collaborative communication features, such as reflective journaling, commenting, and collaboratively constructing blog entries. Rather, they simple posted answers to content-related questions posed by their teacher in the blog.
17. Focus on the technology overshadowed focus on social studies learning.
18. Little to no peer-peer communication or collaboration within these courses, which may have been due to smaller enrollment in her sample of online social studies courses.
19. Adventure learning (AL) is a learning theory that situates learning within a hybrid online collaborative environment that provides students with opportunities to explore real-world issues through authentic learning experiences. It allows learners to connect online when separated by either distance or time, or both, while also providing access to online resources and opportunities for interaction with the real world.
20. Teachers motivated to use an AL program over traditional approaches to classroom instruction did so because of seven main reasons:
    a) The content is authentic.
    b) The content is real time.
    c) Teachers have the opportunity to collaborate with their colleagues for pedagogical ideas and support.
    d) Students have the opportunity to collaborate synchronously and asynchronously with their colleagues.
    e) “Local” case studes are tied to current field research.
    f) Learners and teachers feel a sense of community.
    g) The environment is “ready-to-use.”
21. Adventure learning is one example of an all-inclusive program that is motivating teachers and students where traditional approaches to integrating technology into social studies have not.

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