CEd533: Week 1--How I have seen the Web change Business Education

I have been teaching for only 3-1/2 years and have always used the Web in my classes. However, even in that short time, I have observed some changes in educational Web use which has led to updates in my lesson plans for greater student engagement, timeliness, and relevancy.

Here are some examples from my eighth and ninth grade business education classes:

• In our Marketing unit, I changed advertisement evaluations from print to YouTube. I cannot believe the difference in student excitement and engagement! I now have students eagerly suggesting ads that demonstrate the AIDA (Attention-Interest-Desire-Action) principle and the many advertising approaches (famous person, bandwagon, eye appeal, etc.). More importantly, my students have performed much better on their unit assessments due to how hooked they have become on evaluating ads through YouTube.
• Students have very quick access to answers with the Web. In my recently updated Accounting unit, I asked my Business Venture students to complete an Internet scavenger hunt to find definitions and examples of major income statement and balance sheet components. Following that activity, they created their own financial statements. This was much more successful in achieving student learning than the old study guide/dry erase board method of teaching introductory accounting.
• In Financial Life Skills, my students now use only Internet stock research resources when competing in their stock market simulation. By utilizing JSOnline and Yahoo Finance, students have shifted away from reading the daily newspaper to the point where I cancelled our subscription. This Web access is particularly important for my afternoon classes looking for the most current information on the economy, industries, and companies.
• Finally, I now offer my Financial Life Skills students the choice of either writing a complaint letter or creating a cartoon dialogue using a Web-based cartoon creator from ReadWriteThink.org. Now that I am in my third year of teaching a Consumerism unit, I came to the realization that very few of my students (or their parents) actually write complaint letters. Rather, they take their situation and discuss it on the phone or at the place of business that they are encountering difficulties with. The first two classes that received this option overwhelmingly chose to do the cartoon by a 54-2 margin over the letter. There can be no doubt the Web was a more interesting tool than Word in this situation.
  
  
  
  
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