teachECON 2010 - What We’ll Cover

Ruth Tarrant and I have started the planning for the teachECON events in London and Manchester in October. Our aim is to provide a day rich in teaching ideas and supporting materials for teaching colleagues to take away with them. There will be five main sessions described further below:

The online booking form for teachECON can be found here

Games as Starter Activities

We will take you through a selection of interactive games covering diverse topics such as currency markets, price discrimination and the economics of road pricing. Each will have clear printed materials ready to use immediately in the classroom together with advice for teachers on how to use the games and for some extension activities.

Visual Economics

In this session will we develop some fresh ideas for using visuals as a stimulus for discussion and reflective writing. Visuals take many forms (you don’t have to be a classically trained artist for this session!) and once again we will have plenty for you to take away in full colour mode!

Concept Clips

Ever wondered how episodes of the Simpson’s can be used to enhance your teaching of concepts such as marginal cost and benefit, or raise questions about the role of government and the economics of incentives? Or have you searched for some classic TV and movie clips to reinforce student understanding of externalities, the free-rider, public goods, opportunity cost or perhaps the law of unintended consequences? In our Concept Clip session we will pick out many of our favourites and flag up some of the web resources that can be used to find and harness great clips for using in the classroom.

Digital Tools for Reflective Assignments

The tools available for students to use ICT to research and deliver assignments as part of their learning experience change at a frightening pace. In this session we will be suggesting ways of giving economics students a variety of opportunities to develop their own narrative and deepen understanding of key concepts through the web. We will look at examples of student blogs, collaborative work using software available in the cloud, active (group-based) forums, sequences of conditional activities and a range of quiz and other online tests.

Tips for Active Revision

Our final session will emphasis some simple and effective ideas for active revision - with tips that have worked well for us in the classroom in recent years. The laminator will be working over-time ahead of this session and we will get through a lot of highlighter pens!

So Ruth and I are heading off to start preparing some new materials and refresh some tried and tested ideas in good time for what we hope will be a fun and productive day.

Geoff