A podcast is an audio file published to the Internet for playback on mobile devices and personal computers; the meaning of the term has expanded to include video files, or "enhanced podcasts" as well. Many students are already engaged with digital technologies when they first step into early childhood classrooms. Children as young as three years…

This past spring, a panel of 17 adults at Hofstra University was invited to speak on the topic of "The Teacher Who Shaped My Life." The panelists (professors, teachers, administrators, and undergraduate and graduate students) spoke of teachers who had stretched their students' minds, spoken to their hearts, appreciated them as creative…

In this paper, the authors--a university social studies professor and two elementary classroom teachers in a metropolitan urban community--share their perspectives, experiences, and commitment to keeping social studies in the curriculum. Specifically, they discuss practices that they have engaged in to navigate the school district's mandated…

"Time, Place, and Play," is a short phrase, but is summarizes three very big concepts--history, geography, and culture--that are part of the elementary social studies curriculum. This article relates the story of how twenty-five elementary and middle school teachers, meeting over several weeks in a university class, designed a unit of study on the…