Many years ago I went to Ecuador to travel for the summer. I dropped some things off at a friend’s daughter’s place in Quito and ended up teaching Social Studies for the summer in a mission school. There was no existing curriculum but there was a copy of the final. Since all I had was the final, I had to determine what the previous teacher had considered important. It became apparent that he had been concerned with comparing countries, geography, etc. One question was “How is Italy similar to and different from Japan?” So I decided to follow the previous teacher’s approach. Each student became an expert in a country from a certain area by reading the textbook and asking any missionary who had been to that country. As each student presented his/her country by displaying maps, artifacts, etc., the others chimed in with similarities and differences. Students made huge charts of the similarities and differences among the many countries. They looked for how each country was the same and different.
Upon returning to the USA, I talked with a Social Studies teacher friend. He quickly told me that in Social Studies teachers only cover one country at a time. He said that students would get confused if they thought about more than one country at a time. They do not compare and contrast until it is time to prepare for the final then they use concept mapping software to do many compares and contrasts.
What is your curriculum? One that constantly practices the essential skills throughout the year or one that waits until the end to do it? How do you use technology to prepare students throughout the year on the necessary end skills?
© Harry Grover Tuttle, 2007
Education with Technology Harry G. Tuttle 
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