Personal Financial Literacy is a new standard across the country that schools are going to have to attend to from now, and there’s not going to be any avoiding it. Good! Sounds useful to me. Let’s explore a few websites/organizations that could really help in making sure this standard is not only met, but we all thrive in this particular topic:

The Council For Economic Education These guys are the authority on this topic. Be sure to investigate their”Gen I Revolution” game. It’s been used in my classrooms these past few years.

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis An awesome tool that allows the user to create any graph imaginable using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics

Wise Money! This group has a collection of games where the student can learn PFL concepts through trial and error.

BizKids This is/was a program on public television that fancied itself a PFL lesson device for older students (mostly) using ‘hip’ techniques. I found it quite engaging, and well worth the 20-minute videos. Be sure to play the games as well!

There’s plenty more out there to explore. This is just a taste, but a good one.

One of the courses I teach, titled “Discrete Math” focuses the second semester on personal financial literacy and the financial choices students will face in their early 20s when their parents aren’t as viable of a resource as they are when the students are seniors. There is a huge learning curve, and a lot of difficult decisions await them, nearly all of them typically undiscussed hitherto. We study a lot of concepts in the realm of credit, banking, and investing. This is a list of 5 things one can do to help ensure financial peace of mind in those early days of adulthood.

1. Open a personal checking account- Sure. Your parents opened a checking account for you. And yeah, I’m sure grandma funneled some checks your way for birthdays and St. Patty’s Day or whatnot. But those dream funds will become fewer and further between, and the reality is that the only way you’re getting money is through your own hard work making it happen. So you need your own (free) checking account, started by you, local to where you’re at (in case you moved out of state for college), ready for deposit from the employment you eventually land. Direct deposit is a powerful (sometimes necessary) tool, and having your own local account is really the only way to make that happen successfully. Search the campus peg boards, go to business fairs, use the internet, find the right bank for you that has what you want/need (access, proximity, free coffee on Saturdays, whatever it is you deem a need) and open that account. Which brings up #2,
2. Get a job- Don’t waste time when you arrive to where you’re going to be living in your early 20s, get out on the pavement and sell your skills! Trust me, the longer you wait to apply for work, the more viable candidates will show up for that same position. Hit the campus rec center, go to the auditorium, try the grounds maintenance if you’re inclined. Find some baby-sitting, a car wash, a Subway, lifeguard, delivering USA Todays, whatever. Get a paycheck, and get it quick. Don’t wait for the rest of the college/world to show up.
3. Get a credit card- One. And only one. When you arrive on campus for your first year in college, a large fair will invariably be held somewhere near a convening place for students, and banks will be present (hey, get a checking account!) with their offers for credit. You should get one. Know the standard interest rates for a first-timer (here’s a good place to look for starters), and determine what you want your credit card to do for you. Do you want to accumulate points for airline miles? Get cash back rewards? Establish a long-term committment with a particular bank for future issues such as car loans and mortgages? And here’s some food for thought: an outstanding way to build credit, accumulate points, accumulate a cash-back reward is to use the credit card for all your day-to-day purchases, but this takes INCREDIBLE DISCIPLINE!! You have to have a firm grasp of exactly how much your inputting into your bank account and not over spend, which would be all-too-easy with a credit card. Maintain a ledger, track every single expense, and then when the credit card bill is due, pay it off in full (because obviously you have the funds as you’ve used none of your actual money, just your credit card). You’ll pay no interest and build a solid line of credit in the meantime. If you feel too irresponsible to maintain such a lifestyle, then don’t do it. Falling into the ocean of credit card debt is easy, and there are no life preservers to help you get out.  Otherwise, the credit card is for emergencies only. Funeral you need to attend? Major necessary car repair? Furnish a small apartment on the fly? Okay. Buy the whole bar a round of drinks? Not so much.
4. Save- A little at first, but do it. Teach yourself the importance of it. Wise indivduals have three months salary saved minimum (a rainy day fund if you will) at all times in order to protect against disaster. If you’re in between jobs (which you will most likel;y be at some point), having that saved cash could literally be a life saver. And if you manage to keep saving piling it up in a savings account, then you can consider some slightly riskier options such as money market accounts, bonds, or even the dreaded stock market. There is no % of income to truly set for any individual (although you may read of some), so determine what you can and stick to it! It can’t be something that’s dismissed easily.
5. Don’t become a free cab driver- I can’t advocate to not have a car. I just can’t. I love cars. Yeah, it’d be easier to not have one in a lot of instances. And there’s no gasoline to deal with, routine maintenance, major disasters, insurance, flat tires, or anything else that could go wrong. But I love me my car. Gotta have it. So… if you’re like me, you really need to establish you are NOT a free cab ride for all those intelligent folk that opted to not have a vehicle, because they’ll ask. For sure. If you have the time and wherewithall, go ahead and offer rides for gas money, no problem there. But when friend after friend is trying to bum a ride to work, the busstop because it’s raining, his girlfriend’s house, the airport, it gets costly. Very costly. And it’s a lot harder to establish a “no free rides” policy when you’ve already been giving them out free to begin with. Establish it up front- I’ll give you a ride (if I’m available), but you need to pay for the gas. No exceptions!

Dear Kyle Mathews, High School Principal:

 

Thank you so much for supporting blogging in the classroom over the last few years, allowing me to use blog interaction as one of my Personal Growth goals for the 2013/14 school year.  This upcoming school year will be my fourth since we got the grant for a classroom set of iPads, but only my second using blogging as a educational strategy in Geometry, Discrete Math and AP Statistics.  Since we’ve used our recent increase in funding to increase technology in the classroom, I wanted to provide as many resources as I can for the teachers who have the classroom sets of Chromebooks and iPad carts this year.

 

Blogging allows for students to synthesize information, have conversations outside of the classroom and have a “voice” that can be more thoughtful.  It allows students to reflect on their own learning process, while allows teachers to track student response and reflection.   Blogging can be asynchronous:  I’ve asked all my incoming AP Statistics students to post a misuse of statistics that they’ve found in the contemporary media.  They will complete this task, using the summer readings and their own explorations of media, post to the blog whenever they complete the assignment and then reflect on classmate posts anytime before school begins.  Thus, a class that hasn’t met yet and that has wildly different summer schedules will still be having an academic “conversation” via blog.  Blogging can be synchronous:  in my Geometry class students will work together to solve a problem in real time, so that they can build on other students’ ideas in order to come to a group solution.

 

Every teacher at Peak to Peak has a SchoolFusion blog attached to the Peak to Peak website, but now that Boulder Valley School District has moved to Google, they have approved Blogger (and it no longer gets stuck in the web filter!) Blogger offers even more opportunities for dynamic learning, since teachers can embed videos, link blogs and specify content in ways perfect for the classroom; this is the classroom blog site that I’ve been using for the past year and plan to use in 2014/15. Other great uses for blogs that can help my colleagues design dynamic classroom practices are as follows:

• A wonderful “workshop” opportunity where students post writing, ideas or solutions and then offer each other feedback.
• An opportunity for formative assessment as students demonstrate understanding by synthesizing material in response to a prompt.
• A way to have classroom readings be a more dynamic experience as students share thoughts and questions on embedded reading.
• A chance for students to bring their own background knowledge and expertise to a topic by providing links.
• A great review strategy, where each student is assigned one aspect of curriculum to create review material for and then they can ask each “expert” questions or add to the information.
• An ideal forum for a debate, where the teacher poses a question and students must take a position and support it with evidence.

Hi!

My first 537 entry. I chose edublogs for this course because, honestly, I wanted to try a different format than Blogger, which I’ve used for the past year. So far, I like the user interface presented to me. It’s quite intuitive.

This is my 4th semester (of 6) in the master’s program with Boise State, a program I find truly amazing. I’ve incorporated several techniques in my classroom already, and envision myself transforming my classroom further as I continue. I teach geometry, discrete math (a sort of ‘senior math’), and AP Statistics. I hope to have blogs that are active and useful for each of the courses next year. I feel that, if applied effectively, a classroom blog will go a long way towards creating a structure that students will feel connected to, a sort of home base they can successfully turn to. Combining this with the online textbooks my school is introducing this year in most math classes, I feel that the classroom itself (for me at least) may be changing to one that can be more investigative problem solving, less lecture and rote memorization, and students may find that their time is more effectively utilized.

I am definitely looking forward to this particular course and what it may offer to me as a teacher.