Boundless Economics' Book

I just discovered Boundless which has twenty-four different textbooks and is not married to the concept of pages (thankfully).  One of the subjects is economics.  It is a great "book" on the subject and even has several multiple choice questions on each topic.  If you sign up you can even get free PowerPoints and there is a search engine so you can find topics easily. 

Two More Economist Blogs to Bring the Real World to Class

Both the Economist and the Wall Street Journal have blogs that you can follow if you want to bring real life examples to your classes.  As we weave through the 2014-15 school year and to a lesser degree in the summer of 2014 I will refer to examples from these blogs and other sites that I will be using with my students to make their learning more practical.  

Mankiw's Blog

Greg Mankiw writes one of the more used AP Econ books which is called Principles of Economics.  But he also has a blog on economics which you might want to tag for your teaching. As with teaching government, just giving students problem sets and charts isn't enough, in my mind.  You also have to look at real world examples some of which you can find on his blog.  One of the first posts you will see is on Thomas Piketty's new book Capitalism in the 21st Century which is getting all the buzz from econ profs. 

Andrew Foos AP Microeconomics' Flip Videos

Andrew Foos has been teaching me AP Economics before I in turn have to teach my students next fall.  Here is his complete AP Microeconomics' flip videos (and one above).  If you are into flipping (and more later on this blog) then you will know that you do not have to create everything from scratch and can even use Andrew's videos for your classes.  They do go best with Krugman's AP Economics' book. 

First Post

I have been blogging for six years now with my US Government Teachers Blog, US History Teachers Blog and World History Teachers' Blog.   As a department chair I have developed a habit of changing what I teach to help work out the needs of our department.  That and the fact that I am finishing up my 23rd year of teaching gives me a unique perspective on all social studies' classes (except pys/soc) that have allowed me to write my blogs all these years (and the fact that people keep coming in bigger and bigger numbers).

Well this past summer I took on the task of a new online Virginia class called "Economics and Personal Finance" I continued it during the school year and now have agreed to take on AP Microeconomics/AP Macroeconomics next year.  So this new blog grew out of a request by my colleague Rich Hoppock who also is teaching AP Econ and has agreed to help on this blog.

So if you already know my blogs you know you will get three things from this blog.  1) Lots of resources for economics.  Some of them will overlap the US government site where appropriate (fiscal/monetary) but not where it is only germane to AP Econ.  2) How to integrate technology into the classroom to better educate your students in the 21st century world.  3) Since Economics and Personal Finance classes are growing in popularity across the US I will also add information pertinent to that class as well.