Chapter 14: Media Convergence and The Social Studies

As a young middle school social studies teacher in the 1990s, I was the first in my department to use the LCD projector in my classes to display student projects, show video clips, and yes, to project the occasional PowerPoint presentation. At the time these uses of media delivery technologies were still relatively rare and were viewed as being “cutting edge.” I quickly realized, however, that often times the use of technology and various forms of media took away from more challenging and intellectually rigorous activities. Asking students to add images to a PowerPoint presentation did not require the same types of intellectual work as a critical inquiry lesson did; however, there was a motivational aspect of these lessons for students that was hard to ignore, and they were gaining authentic skills in media production, knowledge construction, and distribution through, at that time, very rudimentary web pages.