Integrating Technology in Business and Information Technology Education

In North Carolina, one programmatic outcome for Business and Technology Education is for students to "communicate effectively as writers, listeners, and speakers in diverse social and business settings." With new Web 2.0 tools like Jing that allow students to capture screen shots and video, and share narrated presentations with peers, students can leverage contemporary technology to function as writers, speakers, and listeners. If students are learning about new software applications in their Business and Technology Education course, they could use a tool like Jing to prepare tutorials for one another on basic or advanced features.

A number of Web services now promote personal Web shops where individuals can sell their customized products to the world. Zazzle is such a service allowing individuals to design and market t-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers, buttons, and more. Tools like Zazzle would be particularly helpful in supporting small business projects where students prepare a business plan for virtual products they can actually sell. In the Business and Information Technology Curriculum, for example, the Small Business Entrepreneurship course emphasizes "skills needed to plan, organize, manage, and finance a small business... each student prepares his/her own business plan."

Zlio is another tool that allows users to create their own personal Web shop and make choices to sell existing products from vendors in specified categories (e.g., sporting goods, magazines, books, music). Students could use the tool in association with a written business or marketing plan to identify product groupings likely to sell, create an image for their business with available shop names, tag lines, and reviews, and market their business with a built-in blog tool and invited contacts (e.g., parents, family members). This tool seems particularly well-suited for E-Commerce courses in the Business and Information Technology Education curriculum.

One outcome of Business and Information Technology Education in North Carolina is for students to "select and apply technology tools for making personal and business decisions." Students also learn "how accounting procedures can be applied to decisions about planning, organizing, and allocating personnel and financial resources." While numerous desktop applications support these outcomes, including the obvious Microsoft Office, it should be noted that an increasing number of online applications provide similar services with the added benefit of allowing students to collaborate on data collection and manipulation. eXpresso is one such application allowing students to share and collaborate on spreadsheets. Such tools could be integrated into projects where students are tasked with organizing and interpreting numerical data. See also Google Docs and Spreadsheets.

The Exploring Business Technologies course in the Business and Information Technology curriculum involves students studying applications and careers in various fields. One tool to aid students in their research of careers is the del.icio.us social networking service. It allows individuals to tag and annotate web sites, effectively sorting them in conceptual categories. Students can also set up and join networks of their peers to view and share saved sites. If a teacher establishes a standard set of tags before students begin their research (e.g., "marketing_firms"), after students tag sites with the same term, they can pull up all the sites their classmates saved under that term (e.g., http://del.icio.us/tag/marketing_firms). This strategy would support collaborative research around an assigned topic or career.

Keyboarding is a middle grades course in the Business and Information Technology Curriculum. Many Web sites are now available with drill and practice exercises that allow students to practice their keyboarding skills online and receive feedback on performance. This Web page lists several resources.

This is an interesting tool that captures in a file that can be sent to another person and played back, how the writer types out a message, including when they mess up and have to backspace over misspelled words. I think it might be a useful tool for a keyboarding teacher. Students could be given test passages to type, with the results emailed to their teacher.

Interactive applets are available on the Internet to teach students the basics of local area network designing for Networking courses in the Business and Information Technology Education curriculum. The WebNet LAN Designer is an older example that I could not get to run using the newer Firefox browser.

Lulu is a self-publishing service that allows users to upload content, design publications in various formats (e.g., paperback books, photo books, calendars, etc.), and sell their products online. Some schools have used services like Lulu to publish collections of student work such as poems or short stories. A school could design an interdisciplinary project where students in Business or E-Commerce courses developed a business or marketing plan, and worked with students in Language Arts and/or Art to publish student works through Lulu. A school could designate any profits generated from the sale of publications (what parent wouldn't buy one!) to school needs such as computers for participating classrooms. Students in Accounting courses could maintain the books and project profits.

A mashup is a Web site that takes one Web resource or service and repurposes it for another use. For example, this Mobiledia site makes use of Google Maps in providing a cell phone tower search and output illustrating towers in a specific area. Business education teachers could leverage the idea of mashups and ask their students to consider disparate online information sources and recommend a new hybrid form that might be popular enough to attract users and advertising revenue.

MoneyTrackin' allows users to create and track budgets associated with accounts or projects online. Budgets can be tracked in more than 40 different currencies with credits visible in green and debits in red. Users can generate charts and export Excel spreadsheets and PDF files with budget details from specified periods of time. Teachers could set up mock accounts with budget limits for student groups, then allow them to research products and make purchase decisions for a variety of situations (e.g., new start-up business). Students in Accounting could use the tool to track daily returns of simulated stock purchases or to compare revenue streams with outgoing expenditures in simulated businesses. Adult learners could use the tool to practice family budgeting and financial planning.

A number of online polling sites are available that allow students to collect their own data. These tools might assist Business and Information Technology Education students with market research prior to developing a mock business plan (i.e., "Would you buy a product that...?"). Vizu allows students to create free polls with each poll generating a unique URL. Polls can be public, emailed to specified users, or password-protected. Poll code can be exported to place questions directly on student-generated blogs or Web pages.

By definition the Digital Communication Systems course teaches students to work with handheld devices such as PDAs and GPS. A great way to develop student skill with GPS devices is to participate in geocache exercises where students hunt for caches using clues and coordinates. It makes sense that students learning to communicate with digital systems could also be involved in storing coordinates and preparing geocache activities for their peers. I heard about one school that captured a number of GPS coordinates using GPS devices to prepare a technology-enhanced walking tour of the North Carolina zoo. Students from the school who were going on a field trip then used GPS devices and clues prepared by the advance team to locate specific habitats at various stored coordinates.

The Computer Applications I course in the Business and Information Technology Education curriculum includes student communication through desktop publication applications. If your school doesn't have access to the commonly used Microsoft Publisher application, LetterPop is a Web-based tool students can use to prepare colorful newsletters and catalogs. Each email account can prepare up to 10 newsletters for free before pricing kicks in.

Could there be a better time to be a Business and Information Technology Education teacher? A recent explosion of new Web 2.0 applications allow students to create their own multimedia content and publish it to the Web. Teachers of the Computer Applications II course which includes student production of multimedia can leverage any number of tools for students to produce audio and/or video enhanced media. Almost all of these applications are FREE! This is my del.icio.us resource page with links to numerous Web 2.0 Multimedia Editors. It's hard to pick just one tool to show in this category when so many exist. Another useful thing about many of these tools is their ability to create shareable content. This feature allows students to comment on and/or peer critique one another's multimedia projects. If privacy is a concern, many tools allow student projects to be designated "private" and shared only with specified email addresses.

An organization dedicated to developing and promoting experiential techniques and simulations in business education.

Virtual suite of simulations based on research funded by the U.S. Department of Education.

Series of business simulations.

Foundation business simulation teaches high school students the principles of business.

Web-based business simulation for college-level students.