Chapter 11: Coming Of Age: Research and Pedagogy on Geospatial Technologies within K–12 Social Studies Education

Throughout the past century, technology use within education has gone through numerous iterations with each new technology promising a transformation for learners, instructors, and classrooms. From the audiovisual movement in the 1930s, the computer-assisted instruction movement in the 1970s and 1980s, and the Internet era of today, the field of educational technology is continually striving to understand how to best integrate technology within educational contexts in order to enhance instruction and learning—a goal that has not been realized. The lessons that researchers within the field of educational technology have learned from the past are that no technology is a panacea for education and that teachers will always be an important factor in better understanding how technology can influence learning (Clark, 1983,, 1985,, 1991 , 1994; Roblyer & Edwards, 2000).