The Final Week of CEdu 525: Using the Internet and Web as a Curricular Resource

Upon completion of our last week of CEdu 525, I find myself brimming with ideas for our Business Education classes at Falls North Junior High. All four courses that I teach are highly conducive to relevant online curriculum use. I am looking forward to applying the Website Evaluation assignment from Session 2 to my Business Venture course. I dearly want to hook my students on accounting and believe that many of the ten evaluated Web sites, particularly Thinkfinity lesson plans and links, will accomplish that. Weaving these online resources with class discussions and real-life business examples (including those from my family's hardware store and my students' family's businesses) will bring accounting, normally a very dry topic, to life! I am also eagerly anticipating incorporating my newly-created Marketing Scavenger Hunt as an introduction to our Marketing unit. My eighth and ninth graders love the challenge of these educational tools and learn so much in a more engaging method. Finally, I will add cyberbullying to the list of topics we cover in the Internet safety unit for 8th grade Computer Applications. I did not realize the seriousness and prevalence of this problem.

Elements of Week 4 that I found helpful include the following:

• Quizlab was fun to try out. We use QUIA (a paid subscription) in the Falls and it was interesting to compare the pros and cons of both. QUIA appears more powerful but I am sure that QuizLab would be a stronger alternative in its paid version. I am converting most of our quizzes and tests to online assessment tools. Students seem to enjoy these more than paper/pencil documents because they provide instant feedback that I add as part of the answering process.
  
• WebQuests are fun to investigate. I found several that I may try as a precursor to our Business Venture business plan project. One involved a chocolate dessert cafe start-up proposal (perfect for my constantly-hungry teens!). Another dealt with monopoly issues for Microsoft, a perfect tie-in with our Competition and Business Types unit.
• The Creative Commons information was helpful to know. I did not realize that there is a legitimately "grey area" that serves as a helpful alternative to the previously "black and white" area of educational copyright issues. There is no doubt that technology has pushed educators to reevaluate traditional copyright law.

All in all, I found great value in CEdu 525 because it provided us with so many online resources that we can take back to our classrooms for the benefit of our students' learning.