UNIT 6: TASK 2: COMMENTS ON APPLICATIONS, TOOLS AND APPS

In the previous post, I listed 5 apps for tablets, 5 applications for PCs, 5 lesson plans for printing and whiteboard and 5 e-books. They were all focused on the fields of Economics. In what follows, I will choose one of each of these and explain how they can help in the organization of the classroom.

I particularly liked World Figures by the Economist. It allows one to have quantitative knowledge with statistics for more than 190 countries. Mainly socioeconomic data is provided and there is a wide range of variables whose main characteristics are described in many different countries. This allows students to compare figures of two or more countries in a touch, obtain intuitive figures (both current and past data) and get a quantitative idea of the main economic issues around the world. As a teacher, this helps in comparing different policies that can be observed in different countries and check that the starting point could have been also different in both cases.

In relation to software, Excel is an essential tool that Economics students must learn. It is useful to deal with short data sets, to produce balance sheets, to calculate rates, to draw graphs from given data, to report main statistics of different variables. Nowadays, a large number of data is available in Excel and this helps students to use real data to solve their own exercises. As a teacher is important to provide students this type of tools so that they can be self-sufficient by working with their data of interest or solving particular quantitative problems. Gretl is an alternative program to excel in terms of statistic analysis. It is recommended for students in higher grades. The advantage is that it is completely free and it is available in many languages.

The lesson plan on the labour market (here) is the most attractive to me. It is very well organised and includes a very clear schedule to present the contents divided into two lessons. It includes also activities, presentation and a mind map. It seems to me a very complete resource to be used in order to teach the particularities of the labour market as opposed to other markets.

The set of slides on price elasticity of demand (here) are quite accurate and also very intuitive. They contain nice and real-life exercises Slides on Price Elasticity of Demand, a very intuitive and some very good examples and exercises embedded in the presentation that help fixing the concept of elasticity. I first-hand experienced the difficulties in understanding this concept and I think that going through these slides in detail would help to acquire a clear and deeper knowledge. However, this web site does not allow one to edit the slides which can be quite convenient to personalise different details and examples in order to adapt the presentation to a particular context.

Regarding my choice for ebooks, I found Freakconomics an excellent book for beginners in Economics. This is one of the first books to push economics and data science into popular consciousness. The authors emphasize that economics exists as a tool to study society. They discuss an apparently random assortment of topics, such as the drop in crime in American cities, the corruption in professional sumo wrestling and the real impact of parenting on a child’s life outcomes, among others. The reason why I think it is important for students to read this book is because they should not consider economics as a subject matter, but as a set of tools whose concepts could be use in real life.