So I'm gonna keep on dancing

Though I spent all of Friday thinking it must be Saturday as I clearly was not in a high school, our daytrip to Grand Rapids for the 2014 MACUL Conference was a pleasant way to spend some time. I made it to two sessions on Friday morning. The first was an energetic rundown of all the infographic creation tools you could ever want while the second gave us a look at the idea of giving your students an authentic audience for whom to perform.

I have been developing this problem (compulsion? ailment? talent?) whereby I walk away from everything thinking about how I can use everything I do and see in my classroom (or in an RWT) and MACUL was of course no exception. 

Created on Easel.ly
I think students could do better.

As Dr. Julia VanderMolen ran through her list of inforgraphic websites, I was thinking about where I could incorporate them into my lessons. With infographics, you have the ability to present statistics, data, and information visually for those learners who might otherwise be trying to recall information by picturing what the slide looked like or where a fact was on the page. While this could be a wonderful way for teachers to present some information, websites like easel.ly could be simple enough to use that the students themselves could be the creators, something Dr. VanderMolen points out can help your class span Bloom’s taxonomy. 

Later I was stuck thinking through how I can add a level of authenticity to my assessments thanks to the very warm David Theune. The authentic audience motivates students to do more than just earn the grade. They are given the chance to perform for others—their peers, their community, their families, maybe even the world. David has used an authentic audience to make learning more meaningful. He tells of one project where he convinced a community organization to donate money to his class, not for the students, but for them to give to the nonprofit organizations about which they wrote. 

So I walk away from MACUL thinking about how I can put these elements into my classroom. I wonder if I might have the students create infographics to show their classmates how economic indicators are used to measure the economies of various countries. I need to lesson plan… 

Make the money, don't let the money make you

Why are the people on the internet so inspiring? Why do they make me think so much about things that I do not have the time to really focus on right now?

A couple months ago, I was hanging out with a friend from my undergrad days who is working on his economics degree and also happens to be very interested in both education and policy. We were, as normal friends do, looking at the high school state standards that Michigan has for economics and both dismayed at how much it packed into them. 

When it comes to personal finance being included in the standards for economics, I was initially annoyed by how much time that took away from fun things like simulating monopolistic competition and learning game theory (don’t get your hopes up, game theory is not in the standards). Then, however, it occurred to me what huge disservice it is to students for personal finance to be treated as an afterthought, tossed in at the end. Make a budget, think about your decisions, talk about risk management. Done.

That kind of lesson in financial literacy is not going to help my ninth graders take care of themselves four, five, ten years down the road. 

Brian's blog also has a post about these cool napkin drawings by
financial planner Carl Richards.

Eliza has been interested in financial literacy too and brought to my attention the blogger and educator Brian Page who believes wholeheartedly in our children being taughtpersonal finance in a stand-alone, semester-long, required course taught by a trained teacher (i.e. not me). 

This also happens to be an issue that is on the minds of some legislators up in Lansing, as my undergraduate econ buddy informed me, but the chance of making it happen isn’t great given the number of requirements already needed to graduate. 

While this is the case at least, I have found a good resource in Brian and he seem to know his stuff.

I don't know how to read but I've got a lot of toys

This week, I have the laptop cart at my placement checked out all week. The last time we did this, thing went well; all the computers worked, they were all charged, and the students were fairly on task. We’ll see what happens this time.

On the first day my mentor teacher and I walked into the classroom before the year began, we found that it had been entirely rearranged to fit the direction of the new whiteboard and projector. My school has in the past few years gotten a lot of new technology, though perhaps not where it would be most immediately useful (having the printer work on the first try is reason to celebrate). The computer lab is filled with beautiful, crisp, large-screen computers that are a bit hit-and-miss when it comes to actually being able to connect to the internet. The district-issued MacBook Pro laptops given to all the teachers are getting slow with the amount of information stored on them.

What I seem to be noticing the most is that for all the money spent on new technology in my placement, it doesn’t always appear to be going where it would be most helpful. There always seems to be some amount of troubleshooting involved with using technology and there is not a lot of professional development or training provided to the teachers. No one showed them how to hook up to the new projectors or use them in the way they need to; they were given a packet of instructions.

The media specialist is split with a middle school and I don’t even know how thinly spread tech support is, but from my experience, teachers are struggling with the technological challenges they face. It serves as a reminder to always plan for problems and complications. Though this has been bothersome at times, I am glad to be aware of these issues now so I know what to be prepared for in the future.

Though I doubt my district will give me a laptop.

This is my method when it comes to working on Macs.
(Via xkcd)

Show you what all that howl is for

Orson Welles, Associated Press via LA Times

I love listening to the radio. I start every day with Morning Edition or Car Talk on the weekends, and listen to the BBC World Service as I go to sleep. I think I could listen to Ira Glass narrate the grass growing. When we were kids, my brother would record episodes of Whose Line is it Anyway? to listen to on long car trips and my mother has the old radio show The Shadow on CD. The only reason I’m not listening to NPR as I write this is that there’s a really cool show on PBS about Orson Wells’ War of the Worlds radio play.

Of course, I had a good time listening to my classmate’s presentation about using podcasts in the classroom. I hate to admit they were good, but they were good. Listening to what they had come up with and recorded was pretty impressive—I would very much like to make my own golden record now, thanks.

So many ideas were swimming in my brain at the end of the evening and I have not really stopped thinking about it. I would love to have my students produce their own news stories about a current political or economic event, or something happening in their own community. They could interview other students around the school about their opinions during campaign season or our next debt deal debate.

I think it could also be a helpful learning tool. After generating class definitions for key concepts, we could record them and keep an audio encyclopedia from which the kids could study. I think some may also benefit from using audio recordings of some tougher readings to go along with the text.

I don’t know everything I could do with this, but I’m definitely making my students listen to Marketplace Money soon.

This doesn't really relate to anything, but I like listening to him.

I want to turn the whole thing upside down, I'll find the things they say just can't be found

Last week in my student teaching placement we had a global trade simulation. We've been watching a movie and discussing things a lot lately, so this was a nice change of pace. And the kids loved it. 

I mean they LOVED it. 

It was actually quite a lot of just to watch these kids running around, climbing on chairs, yelling over each other stock exchange-style just so they could import and export enough to meet their quotas and overcome the trade restrictions. Our Ghana team was over the moon when they figured out they could buy oil and then resell it to the nations with embargoes against Saudi Arabia at a premium. Fist bumping occurred. 

We don't spent a lot of time lecturing, but that just makes me wonder all the more if flipping would be feasible for my econ classroom. The lectures and lessons do not really seem hard to turn into videos or podcasts and that could free up class time to focus on what is most important in economics: practice and application.

The presentation we had from veteran teacher Jonathan Thomas-Palmer not only made me regret not taking physics when I was a student at the high school he taught at, but also made me think a lot about what goes on in my classroom at my placement.

One thing that tends to take a lot of time in our econ class is going over the study guide. Though students are meant to fill it out as they read the chapter for homework, they usually have so many questions about things they didn’t understand when we review it in class that it must feel like doing the assignment twice. But if we move the lecture out of the classroom and align it with the bookwork, it might actually give us more time to go over the concepts in the first place rather than trying to fit all the information into the class period alongside the simulations and real-world application.

 Yeah, let's not be like him...

There are so many things to be taught in economics these days, from foundations and micro to macroeconomics, policy, and personal finance. It is tough to go over everything as well as it deserves. But with planning, the flipping method would allow for clearer and more focused lesson at home with the interactive elements taking center stage at school.

I worry a bit about the digital divide. Of course Jon would not have had a problem with students not being able to watch at home back where I’m from, but now, as a grad student, the internet I depend upon is not as reliable. Having the connection and technology might be a bigger problem in other places. On the other hand, it could be a way to connect students to learning. Many kids already spend a lot of time watching online videos. Many businesses and entertainment outlets have started to reach out to them, so why not education? I think with some experience, the kids might like that too.