ETHW:About-Education

A recent Standards Task Force for the National Council for the Social Studies listed 10 themes that must underpin all social studies courses. “Science, Technology and Society” is one of these themes. Most pre-university educators acknowledge that technological changes have strongly influenced the course of human history and that this importance should be reflected in the curriculum. Equally important, courses in social studies should also convey the idea that society is not a passive agent to technological change. Humans and their social, economic, and political institutions have had, and continue to have, an important hand in shaping the very face of technology. To explore the historical relationships between technological change and societal change with their students, many social studies teachers face a very real practical hurdle: creating lesson plans that delve into technological themes while maintaining close relevance to existing topics taught in pre-university history courses. The Education Portal has been created to help pre-university educators overcome this hurdle.

Using the lesson plans in the Education Portal, social studies teachers will be able to show students the cause and effect of engineering to specific developments within the global story of humankind. Each of the lesson plans in this website will enable teachers to lead their students through a series of readings, questions, charts and other pedagogical tools to understand the links between events and their technological causations. Students will understand that events, major changes and even their own lives are influenced daily by engineering concepts and their developments.

21st Century (CE)

none available

20th Century (CE)

• 9/11/2001: Collapse of the World Trade Center
• Gala Celebrations 4 Telecommunications
• Oil: America’s Complicated History with Black Gold
• Oil and the Unification of Saudi Arabia
• Oil + Demand = Modern Day Resource Colonization
• Oil: The Impact of Oil in the 21st Century
• Scraping the Sky
• Skyscrapers - Buildings that Touch the Sky
• Skyscrapers: Societal Impact of Skyscrapers
• The Space Race and Satellite Technology
• Technology and History: an impact of oil spills
• Technology’s Impact on Where and How We Live
• Top of the World: The purpose of skyscrapers and buildings that have defined our cities
• The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire
• The Urbanization of America and the Foundation of the City
• Why Is Gas So Expensive?
• World History "Fleet Week"
• What's the real message?

19th Century (CE)

• The Bessemer Process
• The Evolution of Communications
• Good Vibrations - How Americans Fell in Love with the Telephone
• A Newspaper in time - an Abolitionist Account
• Origin of Trust Format in Oil Industry
• People’s Choice Awards -Telecommunications Inventors
• Products made from petroleum
• Rise of Telecommunications: Societal impact in the 19th Century vs. Societal impact in the 21st Century
• Technology Of Their Times - A Comparative of Innovators
• Telecommunication, the Civil War and War of 21st Century

18th - 17th Century (CE)

none available

16th - 15th Century (CE)

• A look at navigational technology through Magellan's eyes

14th - 6th Centuries (CE)

none available

5th Century (CE) - 10th Century (BCE)

none available

11th Century (BCE) and Earlier

• The First Machine - The Story of the Bow and Arrow
• From cuneiform to satellite - How did we get there?