CEdu 521 Week 5: Final Project Connections

Going into Week 5 of our class, I thought that the time spent listening to our peers' final project presentations might be tedious and somewhat irrelevant. I am glad to state that I was wrong with those preconceptions! I found many ideas in our unit plans that I can take back to my business students at Falls North. This sharing of relevant technology use and authenticity proved to be most valuable.

Some of the connections I made to improve my students' future learning in Business Venture and Financial Life Skills are as follows:

• Jodi's "Adventures in Buying a Gift" unit had many differentiation suggestions that would easily expand this project beyond special education and into regular education, gifted and talented, and ELL. The product research, consumerism elements, budgeting connections, and presentation possibilities would all work very well for my Financial Life Skills students. The process of gift buying could be modified to fit the consumer purchasing decision lesson in our Business Venture marketing unit. Jodi's use of technology (PowerPoint, greeting card creation, digital pictures, calculations, etc.) and authenticity was strong and made me think further on how to use these tools for our Business Venture entrepreneur profiles and business plans. I look forward to adding more options to assignments that were previously done only in Word plus adding audiences to increase my students' efforts.
  
• Lori's Sickle Cell Anemia unit reinforced my previous brainstorming in the area of presentations. In addition, even though Lori is working with first graders, her research and writing ideas (with much sharing) could certainly be expanded for my junior high students. Finally, both Jodi's and Lori's projects had strong altruistic elements as students were asked to think of others (gift recipients and children with sickle cell anemia). As a business teacher, I strive to add this outward view as often as possible when dealing with ethics, charitable contributions within a budget, and honesty and empathy in interpersonal business relationships.
  

An additional connection that I made was to take my 8th and 9th grade introductory accounting unit and share it with our Menomonee Falls High School accounting teacher. Sara is a fantastic educator who never ceases to make accounting engaging and authentic to her students. I would like Business Venture to serve as a "feeder" to her program by "hooking" my students on accounting. I look forward to Sara's feedback and ideas!