Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

On September 6, the Flipped Learning Network is hosting “Flip your classroom” day. More info at http://www.flippedday.org/ . You could use one of Mary McGlasson’s videos (described in more detail a few weeks ago ), or one of Liam Lenten’s sports economics videos (described in this post ). MobLab is a new site that hosts interactive games that students can access from mobile browsers as well as laptops. I did a demo last month and it looks pretty slick. I could definitely see using this as an alternative to Aplia’s experiments in Principles (especially if, like me , you like Aplia more for the experiments than the problem sets) plus they have a lot of games for upper-division courses. I really should have posted this earlier in the summer but if you or someone you know is teaching for the first time this fall, you may want to look at a paper I have forthcoming in the Southern Economic Journal : “A Primer for New Teachers”, written with Gail Hoyt and Brandon Sheridan. The paper o...

Today is the first official day of my sabbatical – woohoo! Of course, one could argue that my sabbatical really began when the spring semester ended but today is the first official day of the fall semester at school so it’s the first day I don’t “have” to be on campus when I otherwise would. Whenever I tell non-academics about my sabbatical, I feel a little guilty. I know that a lot of my non-academic friends don’t really understand why academics like me even get sabbaticals. After all, it’s not like I’m in archeology or art history or some other discipline where people obviously need the time away from teaching in order to go do field work. I’m not even leaving town this time around. I usually just explain that even if I can get some research done while teaching, I can get a whole lot more done when I have bigger chunks of uninterrupted time. But I think the main reason I feel guilty is because I know that for me, sabbatical is not really about getting work done (although work WI...

This is the last of a series of three guest posts from Mary McGlasson of Chandler-Gilbert Community College. Part I describes how she came to create a set of videos for a hybrid course and Part II discusses how she holds students accountable for watching them. PART III: How did I make the videos? Instructors often contact me asking how I created the videos. Short answer? With LOTS of time and patience. You see, there is no single step in the process that is terribly difficult, but each of the steps does require time. Below (click image to enlarge) is a summary version of the crash course in Digital Storytelling that I co-facilitated at our college ( adapted from " Digital Storytelling Contest " website ). I f you are interested, you can use this link to check out the Chandler-Gilbert workshop page – the PDF of the table below is available for download on that page, so you will have links that work (here, I used screenshots of the table, so of course the links are...