Our second week of CEDu 525 presented me with so many lesson ideas that I am challenged to find the classroom time to apply them all. My peer at Falls North Junior High also took this Stritch graduate program several years ago. Now that I review her lesson planning, I recognize that she introduces one new application in every unit in our Financial Life Skills (FLS) and Computer Applications (CAps) courses. This pacing allows for important reflection and adjustments. I will be sure to do this with my Business Venture (BV)course during the second semester.
In BV , I am seeking to provide more engaging, technology-based lessons for my students, particularly in marketing, human resources, and accounting. As I have observed in FLS, they love to learn through scavenger hunts, spreadsheets, PowerPoints, webquests, online cloze and anticipation guides, and Web-based review games, quizzes, and surveys. The Customer Complaint Cartoon was a huge hit, as evidenced by the high quality work, and tremendous enthusiasm. The cartoons were a joy to grade and more accurately reflect how consumers present problems (conversations over letters) with products and services in the retail marketplace. I will continue to create new Web-based lessons for FLS and BV.
Several things that we did in class last Tuesday were most helpful to me. They are as follows:
- Reading a classmate's blog was useful as it became evident that we all have similar reactions and reflections. In addition, it is important to learn how teachers in other academic areas and age levels apply what we are gaining from CEDu 525.
- I enjoyed observing other scavenger hunts because I saw new methods of using search tools, both within a particular website and on the Web.
- The Thinkfinity lesson plan sharing was interesting as I learned how Katie applied a lesson plan to her West Allis German students. I must look beyond only EconEdLink for lesson plans. Other Thinkfinity resources are excellent, as demonstrated by the success of the Cartoon Creator from ReadWriteThink in my FLS classes.
- On Wednesday morning during my first prep, I asked several students visiting from study hall to check out a few search engines other than Google. I was impressed with the many search options out there and want my CAps students to investigate a metasearch. To my dismay, Ask, AskJr, and Dogpile were all blocked. I immediately called our building tech person and she jumped on it with our central office. We both know Dogpile and Ask had been available and are curious to discover why they have been blocked. This also reinforced that a teacher must always check website links just before students do. I have found numerous blocked or dead links this fall and have fixed them before students began their work.
- I will check out some of the other creative websites such as Toondo. These may even be better than Cartoon Creator in the areas of number of panels and saving capabilities.
- The educational sites we explored will prove useful in the near future. In particular, I will come back to Blue Web'n for business education website resources as I develop my technology-based BV lessons.
- The online quiz sites were interesting for me to compare to QUIA, the subscription service we use in the Falls. Some of the week 2 links were more entertaining than educational. However, Quizlet (a free site!!) provided an engaging method in which to learn vocabulary. I can envision using this for difficult new terms in accounting.
- BrainPop has great potential for my business classes. I am confident that my students would love it. I will explore it in my extra time during final exams this week. The social studies section has several business/personal finance options.
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