3.1 Reflection - My classroom uses many 2.0 tools, but I am always looking at ways of increasing the use of those tools to enhance student learning. My economics and business math courses both use moodle and some online evaluation tools quite extensively. Students are also required to maintain and update via various assignments a google site that serves as an electronic portfolio of sorts. I have used glogster, voicethread, poll everywhere, google apps for education (a site hosted specifically for our middle school students soon to be rolled throughout the district), moodle, gaggle.net (for email), learn2type (for keyboarding instruction and remediation), slideshare.net, etc. My classroom is always a mixture of students interacting in groups, occasionally listening to mini lectures that I will sometimes prepare with jing (a screen capture and narration program which is free) so that students can then access the presentations 24-7 after the initial presentation of materials to the students. I am always trying to improve student's access to the classroom materials without making my course just a watch a video and answer a question. I thought about the following assignment after reviewing some content with my students this past week and re-visiting Google Tours via google earth. Below is a brief description of the beginnings of the assignment. ACTIVITY: Using Google Earth's tour capability, trace the effects of creative disruption in the global marketplace. Your will be part of your presentation that should show knowledge, understanding, integration, application, analysis and evaluation of the concepts of the "invisible hand" and our core basic economics concepts as summarized in our Handy Dandy Guide (HDG): 1. People economize.

2. All choices involve cost.

3. People respond to incentives. Incentives are actions or rewards that encourage people to act. When incentives change, people's behavior changes in predictable ways.

4. Economics systems influence individual choices and incentives. How people cooperate is governed by written and unwritten rules. As rules change, incentives change and behavior changes.

5. Voluntary trade creates wealth. People can produce more in less time by concentrating on what they do best. The surplus goods or services they produce can be traded to obtain other valuable goods or services.

6. The consequences of choices lie in the future. The important costs and benefits in economic decision making are those which will appear in the future. Economics stresses making decisions about the future because it is only the future that we can influence. We cannot influence things that have happened in the past.

SPECIFICS: Your group will be randomly choose a creative disruption to research. Remember, you will be reporting based on your role as an economic adviser for the country that your group was assigned at the beginning of the semester. You will need to use a variety of reliable sources, based on what you have learned via your English classes. They cannot be from social media, blog sites, wikipedia, etc., and you will need to accurately document your sources with the appropriate citation format for the discipline of economics. You tour must include: background about the industry, a thorough explanation of the process and challenge of the industry/innovation you have selected, and the economic-based reasoning, principles, that are expressed and exemplified as a result of the industrial/innovative shift.

I have used many 2.0 tools. For my economics course, I am trying to develop ways for students to put the basic concepts of micro and macro-economics into application. My thought was to use the google earth tour process to have students work with the concept of creative destruction. This concept essentially has students think through various causes and effects of changes in the market on various stakeholders and products -- think disruptive innovation. The use of google tours via google earth would allow students to track the various industries and countries that are impacted with innovations and changes in the market.

The tour would allow students to trace the various suppliers and resources that go into every single product -- even the simple pencil to help them see how small, seemingly un-related items can lead to a large-scale change in a market. A sample of the beginnings of the assignment are shown above. Google Tours would add the connectivity element that is sometimes hard for students to grasp. Being able to physically show how so much of any product is interconnected and can be affected by even the most seemingly insignificant change (a flood in Thailand, for instance, knocked out Honda and much of the electronics industry because the area hit was where microchips were produced -- a major supplier for the world--and the area had record flooding), can bring about changes to price, supply, demand, etc.

Students would be assigned or asked to choose from a list of innovations with the assignment to trace how the improvements and innovations have impacted the economy as a whole of either the world, the country they have been assigned to work with, and the U.S. economy as well.

This assignment would emphasize allow the students to move through all aspects of Bloom's Digital Taxonomy by using the basic economics concepts of supply and demand, opportunity cost, scarcity, etc. to frame their search for connections all the while applying their knowledge by analyzing the cause and effects of various decisions (quotas, tariffs, subsidies, production, expansion and contraction policies, etc.), evaluating the long and short term effects of these decisions, while creating a google tour showing the timeline of the decisions, the locations of the impact as well. Students would be able to collaborate with each other though use of google docs - sharing a document with their plans and research; creating a bibliography by developing a form through a spreadsheet, that they could simply add as they came across good resources; present their tour by embedding it into a prezi presentation, a glogster "poster", or even creating a voice thread site for students to respond with, a google site with quizzes, videos showing background about the topic/industry/innovation, etc. The options for the use of the tools is really limitless. Students could even choose which would be best based on the audience they were focusing on and which media would best convey their message and allow for the easiest embedding of the tour.

Directions for students would need to clearly explain how many "stops" on the tour would be required, what type of analysis would be needed, the format of the final project with lots of practice on how to incorporate the narration, the notes, the pins and location markers, how to export the file and how to prepare it for presentation. Students will need to have extensive plans, scripts, storyboards, outlines to make sure that everything has been thoroughly researched as the actual preparation of the tour, when trying to be very specific can be quite tricky. Another aspect is to have a firmly established timeline, and unlike me this week, check to make sure you know the due dates. They would also need to have presentations about the various tools so that if they were indeed going to be given many options for which type of media they would be using, that they would also have time to practice with the tools to see which ones would best fit their needs. Oftentimes, students will use only what they are comfortable with even though something else may better fit their vision and better relay what information they are trying to convey.