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Technology is used in my classroom every day. I think technology is almost like something...it's
a requriement. It meets the needs of all students today. My name is John LeFeber and I'm the
curriculum instructional developer as well as the project manager for EconEdLink for
the Council For Economic Education. My purpose of being here today was to spend the day working
with teachers to get a better understanding of how they can use technology to teach economics
and personal finance. All of us have been chraged to provide for you and your students
resources to help teach the content that we're responsible for. EconEdLink is a website that
provides lessons and resources for teachers and students to develop a better understanding
of economics and personal finance. I use a lot of EconEdLink for the lesson plan ideas
and activities or resources that I can use when introducing a topic. The popular resources
on EconEdLink are the lessons because those lessons are written by educators. They're
good, solid curriculum based, standard based lessons that we provide for both the teacher
and the students. We have an economic and personal finance group that's there that you
can actually join and begin to share ideas as to what's going on or how things are working
within your class. We've always done interactives, ways that we can engage students online. So
this gives me information that I can relay to them and I can guide them to go there.
What it's doing is it's presenting different ways of teaching economics and it's also I
think sortof reaching out to different types of learners. You can find a lot of websites
that have lessons online and basically what they do is take a document, this is a great
lessons, put it in a PDF file and they put it up online. That's not what we do. We do
online lessons because we feel that the content is there, and what our lessons do is guide
the students through the understanding of the content and how it relates to economics.
So we want the students to interact. We want the students to read material from other websites
that we provide. We create activities for them to do online so that they answer questions
and they're becoming engaged with that technology and engaged with the computer. So if we click
on that middle one... Some students are visual learners and when they see things of that
nature, they get it. There's just so many different types of learners, you can make
things very indavidualized and your are bringing something that isn't foreign to the children.
The children these days are technology based. You know, they're on their cellphones. They're
on their computers. They're listening to their iPods. So you are using a medium that's already
out there that they, they're familiar with and you're simply integrating a teaching tool
into your curriculum. The murktide infestation is growing... Gen i Revolution is a seperate
program that the Council For Economic Education has created and it's a series of missions.
It's a gaming environment for students, for the digital natives to begin to explore. And
that will make children, you know, want to be a part of this game and they have incentives
built in, in terms of, you know, if you know the answer or the more kknowledge, economic
knowledge you have, the higher the point level and the children wanna win the game so they're
gonna learn that economics. It's targeted personal finance. It's a game environment
that students can get excited about. We advertise it through EconEdLink. We show teachers that
it's there and how to use it. Don't get me wrong, I love economics, but I don't love
the way it's currently taught. One way is how do you work economics into the curriculum
in other ways. Paul Solomon was asked to come and share his experiences in developing those
interviews that he has done. I'm the producer or correspondent for a series of videos about
business and economics, how those subjects work tied to current events in the news. They're
teaching the basic concepts of economics, kindof covertly. They're doing it under the
table because they're news reports but in each and every case I'm trying to teach the
fundamentals of economics while doing the reporting. I think the teachers really enjoyed
having him there because he added a different dimension. He comes with a different perspective
and he comes with. He comes with the perspective that here are resources that we feel are good
for economics. How can you make them good for your students in teaching economics and
personal finance? Oh yeah, that's why I came to this seminar because you have different
resources our there and I can pick up a lot of materials or a lot of ideas and then kindof
customize my class and to my students and hopefully keep them engaged. A majority of
these videos would normally be filtered through the board of education? Exactly. We've correlated
every state's standards to our economics standards. My expectations for the takeaway for the teachers,
for what they would walk away with is a better understanding of the resources that the Council
for Economic Education provides. How EconEdLink can be used in the classroom and the fact
that technology is not that intimidating. It is something that they can use and feel
comfortable with. What I was given today will be used immediately within the coming weeks
and months. No doubt about it.