Countdown Timers

Richard Byrne and I were teaching our third of three technology for the Social Studies classroom today when a teacher asked me how I keep my students on task in a flipped room.  One trick I mentioned is countdown timers projected on the front of the classroom.  Believe it not the kids sense the time restraints.  Like anything it isn't good to do it every day, but can be one trick in your hate. Here are several types and the one above is what Richard suggested.

• countdown clock
• sand dial
• timer
• egg timer

Absolute and Comparative Advantage

Today my students are working on comparative and absolute advantage. If any of them have problems, the video above is what I share with them - and what helped me when I was trying to grasp it a few years ago.

Jason Welker's Blog

Jason Welker is both an IB and an AP economics teacher from the US who teaches in Switzerland. He has an amazing number of resources including his blog (Economics in Plan English), videos (see below for an example) and his webpage.  He also sells resources.  Since IB economics demands that students know a real life example (something AP doesn't seem to do), his blog is filled with just that - real life examples, but also about his techniques and new items has put online.  You can also find him on Facebook.  

Algorithmic Trading

I showed a part of this to my economics and personal finance students the other day.  Skip to 1:15 where it starts discussing algorithmic trading.  My students found it very helpful to understand the concept and to contrast it with the old way of trading on the floor of the stock exchange.  

Economists - Starting at the Beginning

We will have our back to school night in late September and I will probably give my parents part of this introductory video so they can visually see and hear what their students will be studying in my AP Micro/macro course.  This video starts with scarcity, gets into normative and positive statements, then goes to the difference between micro and macro and finishes with explaining why so many fields need to use economics to understand their discipline. 

Todays Meet as an Alternative for Twitter

Richard Byrne and I started teaching a class together online tonight.  One of the things we spoke about what using Twitter in your classroom.  Several of the middle school teachers were understandably hesitant.  So I suggested something we also use at Hayfield called TodaysMeet.  The beauty about this site is that there is no login or password required for the kids.  You can also set the time paramaters and share the link only with your students.  It is can be used to have a discussion.  You could use it if you want the students to watch something at home and have a live chat. Alternatively you could use it so students could carry on a conversation during a portion of a movie giving them some active participation skills.  Believe me they are used to using two devices at once and will find this easy to do.

Above is a great tutorial about it. 

Google Chrome Split Screen Extension

I am slowly gearing up for having Chromebooks in my classroom this fall and will also be testing (since I haven't felt it was good enough until now) Google Classroom.  In that endeavor I found Alice Keeler's Chrome extension (her blog is also very helpful) to let you split your window so you can have your gradebook on one side and the student work on the other.  Of course if you don't want her extension, just watch my video video below on how to do it by opening up two windows.  

Crash Course Economics - First Installment

So over the next forty weeks, Jacob Clifford and Adrienne Hill will be teaching economics via Crash Course.  It will be a mashup of theory, charts and examples - the perfect mix.  Above is the first installment that looks at concepts such as scarcity, incentives, opportunity costs, etc. 

Crash Course Economics

Thanks to Norma Duez on the Facebook AP Economics page for alerting me to fact that Crash Course Economics has finally started.  Above is the introduction.  It will be co-hosted by Jacob Clifford who has a great cache of tutorials on economics and Adrienne Hill of NPR's Planet Money who will give the real world applications to the video.  Sounds like a great mashup.

The actual series will begin next Wednesday and can be found here.