Accio Geography!

Ah, Geography!  I actually hated that word until last semester.  My elementary and secondary school teachers had always focused on map coloring and memorization aspect of geography.  Then, taking a college geography class, I learned that it included much more than simple tasks.  Geography includes location, place, region, movement, and human-environmental interaction.  This allows for discussion of culture, environmental issues, and more.  Here are some helpful websites for geography teachers:

• The CIA World Factbook provides a wealth of geographical information about regions and countries of interest.
• National Geographic Magazine is an absolute necessity when discussing geography.  Its website also includes a detailed page of information, lesson plans, and more for teachers.
• Many geography classes study the book and/or movie Guns Germs & Steel to learn about regional differences and the geographic roots of worldwide economic disparities.
• If students do memorize parts of maps as part of their class (I'll admit, it does help), there are online games to help with practice.  I found them to be a lifesaver when preparing for weekly map quizzes.
• For teachers giving map tests, World Outline Maps has blank maps for the tests themselves.
• Finally, no list of geography resources is complete without reference to Google Earth.  The program is indespensable in its many layers of resources: historical maps, labels of all sorts, links to informational web articles, and more.

Economics + Education = Econucation

The internet is full of websites that can help teachers to teach mid-level economics.  Most of what I found was lists of websites and lesson plans, but here are a few highlights of my search:

• I know it has been said before and shows up on almost every page of economics education links in existence, but EconEdLink is amazing.  It has literally hundreds of lesson plans and helps teachers to stay up-to-date on current national GDP, CPI, inflation rates, unemployment rates, etc.
• The Journal of Economic Education is not a specific website, but it publishes articles relating to the latest research on teaching economics, from grading to promoting student achievement in economics to gender differences in studying economics.  CSB/SJU has access to the journal articles through jstor.org.
• It may be a bit advanced for middle school students, but I absolutely loved the stock market competition in my economics class.  Students invest a certain amount of money in virtual stocks (my partner and I bought Apple and 3M) that gain and lose value as the corresponding real stocks gain and lose value.  This helps students learn how the stock market works in a very memorable way.  I will never forget beginning the game on a day in 2007 when the market began a sudden and significant nosedive!
• The American Economics Association and Internet 4 Classrooms both post lengthy lists of other resources for learning and teaching economics.  The links include lesson plans, organizations, blogs, and information about the subject itself.

I fear that the last bullet point has included enough resources to make any more suggestions on my part completely useless.  That being said, do you have any favorite Economics resources that, like EconEdLink, deserve top billing rather than merely existing on a lengthy page of resources?  I would love to hear about them!