Social NetworksOur kids live on social media these days. One crucial way to make learning relevant is to meet ’em where they live, which means finding social media sites that work in the classroom. Social media organically dovetails with subjects like language arts and social studies, but tech savvy teachers know that collaboration can work in any classroom.
Not all social media sites are equal — and not everyone is comfortable turning their students lose on Facebook or Twitter. Here are 10 Top sites that are safe while still engaging. |
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Social Network Trends1. Messaging platforms will trump broadcast social networks
2. Brands continue to optimize for social media platforms 3. Social media advertising will become more and more relevant 4. Social videos will become huge 5. Storytelling is the key to an effective customer experience How will these trends affect Business Education? |
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Shark Tank
Shark Tank is a great resource for teaching Business Education skills. Entrepreneurs stand before five sharks — some combination of; Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban; real-estate mogul Barbara Corcoran; QVC’s Lori Greiner; technology innovator Robert Herjavec; FUBU founder Daymond John venture capitalist Kevin O’Leary — pitch the idea for their company and then offer the sharks a share of it in return for some investment.
Using Shark Tank concepts, students learn about the importance of legally protecting their company via a patent, and protecting their logo and tagline with a trademark. They learn the costs associated with leasing a space to conduct business operations. Additionally, they use those Common Core staples of critical thinking and problem solving to determine their cost of goods sold, distribution methods, marketing tactics and total start-up funds that would be required to launch their businesses. |
Lesson Plans:
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Marketing Resources
A great resource for teaching marketing. All the activities and discussion exercises are provided free for marketing lecturers to use in their classes. The material is designed to:
- be easy-to-use,
- reduce preparation time,
- add variety to sessions, and
- appeal to different learning styles.
Tech Tools for Blended Learning
Blendspace
Blendspace is an excellent free tool to create flipped lessons for your class. It is an easy to use platform for creating multimedia lessons that students can access online. Using a drag-and-drop interface, you can organize videos, text, links, images, and quizzes into cubes, then organize them to create lessons. The maximum number of free active lessons is 100. Besides sharing lessons with the class, you can also use it to collect web sources in a single place that you can share with students with just one link.
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ThingLink
ThingLink is an interactive media platform for creating interactive images and videos for web, social, advertising, and educational channels. Make your images come alive with video, text, images, music and more! With ThingLink you create interactive images with notes and rich media links.
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Wizer
Wizer lets teachers easily create online, multimedia online “worksheets” (even better, you can use or modify ones other educators have made), give students the url address to the “worksheet” (I’d just copy-and-paste it on our class blog), students quickly and simply register on Wizer, complete the worksheet, and, voila, teachers can easily see each students’ work.
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theLearnia
theLearnia is a free online whiteboard designed with teachers in mind. They built theLearnia to help teachers overcome the main challenge of video creation by simplifying the process into a single click.
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Tildee
Tildee is a free tool to help you create and share instantly and easily tutorials on any subject. With a clear and user friendly interface, you go straight to the point: → write your own tutorial. More than that, you will be able to add maps, images and even videos to any step in a tutorial. You can add text, maps, videos and photos.
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Vizia
Vizia is a free tool for creating video-based quizzes. On Vizia you import a video from YouTube or from Wistia and then add questions along the timeline of the video. You can ask multiple choice questions as well as short answer/ open-response questions. Adding a poll question into the video is also a possibility. All of the responses to your questions are collected in a spreadsheet that you can download and or opened in Google Sheets. Vizia could be a good tool to use to create short flipped video lessons in which you ask questions to check for understanding.
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Easelly
Easelly is a great program and is one of the easiest for creating Infographics, however it does lack some of the guidance, and features, that come standard in other programs. If you’re just looking to design an infographic, this program will work well.
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Canva
Canva is a tool to create designs for Web or print: blog graphics, presentations, flyers, posters, invitations and so much more. Canva is a tool loaded with enough easy-to-use features and functionality that anyone can create a variety of engaging content that gets shared.
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