Healthcare

If your students are anything like mine, they like to talk about the election and what will happen after President-Elect Trump takes office. One thing they have asked about is healthcare. Most of them do not understand what healthcare is, let alone, why it is so expensive. This video explains some of that in a fun way. I pause it at 1:54 and talk about how many mandates there are in my state, according to this video there are 58. It is also fun to introduce this by asking each student what they like on their pizza and opening up Pizzahut.com and seeing what the cost of a pizza would be if you added the toppings everyone wanted. Even though this is from ReasonTV, it presents the topic in an interesting way. the last part of the lesson is we come up with solutions as to how to curb health care costs.

Caitlin Tucker's Blended Learning Video Library

One of the people I follow on Twitter is teacher Caitlin Tucker who has a great library of what is meant by blended learning and how a teacher can implement it in the classroom.  Above is one on creating a flipped classroom. 

Picographs

My wife happened across this website. It has some great pic-o-graphs about a number of economic issues. I am not sure how I would use this as an assignment, but most certainly I would use it for off-shoot issues we tend to talk about, like what an economic choice it is to have kids. I tend to talk about that when talking about opportunity cost. This is great for any level to enhance any discussion.

Fake News Fake Out

There have been a number of stories, that have been showing up on Facebook and Twitter, that have been calling attention to fake news stories and sites. This push seems to be rooted in the election, though this can be connected to economics in a big way. This isn't even talking about economic illiteracy, but instead on news that could cause economic problems. Many of us and most of our students get our news from social media sites, which by design, only show us news based on our own likes and biases. It is important our students know how to tell which news is real and which is fake. Google and Facebook are even getting into the story. Here is a Wall Street Journal article related to this topic.