Skip to main content

Link round-up

Here are a few links if you want to procrastinate from grading, or get inspired for next semester...

2012 Christmas Price Index: The Cost of Christmas is up 4.8% this year. Each year, PNC makes the website a little more complicated. This year, you have to go around the world to find each item. If you have a slow internet connection, I think it would be kind of frustrating (each scene seems to take a while to load, even with a decent connection) but if you just want the punchline, click on 2012 Gift Price Index in the menu along the bottom.

Deck the Halls with Macro Follies: The latest video from EconStories (the guys who brought us Hayek vs. Keynes) has Keynes and other macro forefathers explaining their theories to the tune of Christmas carols.

How Economics Saved Christmas: This 2010 parody of 'How the Grinch Stole Christmas' is a great way to introduce externalities (hat tip to Economist Educators!).

Tons of Quick Tips for Flipping Your Class: The 'flipped classroom' (i.e., having student acquire content outside of class so that class time can be used for interaction and applications) seems to be a big buzzword these days. Whether you've been flipping your class for years, or just beginning to think about it, the Peer Instruction blog has lots of great advice.

EdTech resources on Pinterest: I'm not a 'pinner' but this board (via Texas Wesleyan CETL) appears to have some great resources for edtech geeks.

And on a side note: If anyone is planning to attend the Western Economic Association conference in Seattle next summer (or is in the Seattle area already) and would be interested in being part of a panel on making classes more interactive, please email me!

Comments

Post a Comment

Comments that contribute to the discussion are always welcome! Please note that spammy comments whose only purpose seems to be to direct traffic to a commercial site will be deleted.

Popular posts from this blog

When is an exam "too hard"?

By now, you may have heard about the biology professor at Louisiana State (Baton Rouge) who was removed from teaching an intro course where "more than 90 percent of the students... were failing or had dropped the class." The majority of the comments on the Inside Higher Ed story about it are supportive of the professor, particularly given that it seems like the administration did not even talk to her about the situation before acting. I tend to fall in the "there's got to be more to the story so I'll reserve judgment" camp but the story definitely struck a nerve with me, partly because I recently spent 30 minutes "debating" with a student about whether the last midterm was "too hard" and the whole conversation was super-frustrating. To give some background: I give three midterms and a cumulative final, plus have clicker points and Aplia assignments that make up about 20% of the final grade. I do not curve individual exams but will cu...
3 comments
Read more

THE podcast on Implicit Bias

I keep telling myself I need to get back to blogging but, well, it's been a long pandemic... But I guess this is as good an excuse as any to post something: I am Bonni Stachowiak's guest on the latest episode of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, talking about implicit bias and how it can impact our teaching.  Doing the interview with Bonni (which was actually recorded a couple months ago) was a lot of fun. Listening to it now, I also realize how far I have come from the instructor I was when I started this blog over a decade ago. I've been away from the blog so long that I should probably spell this out: my current title is Associate Vice President for Faculty and Staff Diversity and I have responsibility for all professional learning and development related to diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as inclusive faculty and staff recruitment, and unit-level diversity planning. But I often say that in a lot of ways, I have no business being in this position - I've ne...
Post a Comment
Read more

What was your high school economics experience like?

As I mentioned in my last post , I am asking my Econ for Teachers students to reflect on their reading by responding to discussion prompts. It occurred to me that it wouldn't be a bad idea for me to share my thoughts on those issues here and see if anyone wants to chime in. For this week, the students were asked to read the California and national content standards , an article by Mark Schug and others about why social science teachers dread teaching economics and how to overcome the dread, an article by William Walstad on the importance of economics for understanding the world around us and making better personal decisions (with some evidence on the dismal state of economic literacy in this country), and another article by Walstad on the status of economic education in high schools (full citations below). The reflection prompt asks the students to then answer the following questions: What was your high school econ experience like? What do you remember most from that class? How do...
2 comments
Read more