c. Selecting ICT Resources

The teacher in the case study is completely at home with the skills behind most of the options we have looked at above, though he has limited knowledge of PowerPoint and is likely to be shown things by pupils as much as the other way around. He has a little experience of hypertext, and feels uncomfortable about developing whole resources based on either hypertext or Excel.

You may not be in the same positions as he is, so we shall look at the options in the context of your school and your experience. Think about the following points as they apply to you:

Use discussion only, and not use any ICT (or other technology) at all.
I have a bit of a problem with this (I would say that, wouldn't I?) in as much as my own experience of working with this area of work is that it is both enjoyable - on its own, without technology - and very challenging for pupils at intermediate and Advanced levels of GNVQ. Especially in terms of the objectives set for this case study, there are some interesting ways of using ICT to play games and generate models that we shall see as we go along. For this reason, and because you and your pupils will come up with further ideas of your own once you have seen the basic ideas at work in the case study, I would not want to discount ICT altogether.

Use a word processor package to create worksheets on the area of work.
Here the question is one of how much the pupils will learn, retain and organise if the teacher spends his time on creating learning and testing resources using a word processor, and how much they would have done so anyway. My own view is that it need not take much time to create high quality learning resources that integrate text, graphics and other stimuli - flow charts and tables, for example, that illustrate processes and products. It also seems likely that the time spent on creating high quality resources of the sort the teacher wants is likely to be returned in the adaptability and re-usability of the resources.

Undertake a practical exercise based on available data and issues in the press and through the broadcast media.
This is the kind of method most of us are very familiar with from GNVQ and other courses. The use of current data to generate speculations and models based on and designed to improve theoretical understanding is common practice. The problem for me with the method is that it is often time-consuming, the data sources are diverse and require work to pull them together, and the results are often unpredictable and unprofitable. The use of ICT helps us to rationalise the process of business and economic modelling in a way that enables pupils to see the principles and theories more clearly, so I would certainly want to retain the practical work and add to it some modeling activities that were ICT based.

Use the World Wide Web to gather resources and develop modelling exercises.
The way this case study works is both by gathering resources from the web and by using a specific facility on the web provided by the Bized site. I am referring here to the online Virtual Factory and Virtual Economy that you will see referenced later in the case study. The Virtual Factory is not strictly speaking a modeling environment at all. Rather it is a range of information, questions, tasks and exercises arranged around the concept of the factory in a way that will help pupils see the relevance of the theory to practice. It is an excellent resource, and the site owners have generously allowed us to download it to the disc so that you can use it without being reliant on the web. The Virtual Economy is what I would call a proper modelling environment. You input conditions and it outputs results, using the parameters of what is understood by economics to model the behaviour of an economy based on the conditions you set. It doesn't take long for pupils and other users to get a sense of how factors affect economies and entities within economies by this method, and in this sense the Virtual Economy is to me one of the most useful sites available for Business and Economics pupils.

Use other forms of modelling exercise, such as creating his own hypertext worksheets in Word, providing multiple choice models in PowerPoint, or creating number-based models using Excel.
I have said above that the teacher in this case study is not entirely confident with this area, and I don't really expect you to be either. I expect you to be confident with Word and the web in a way that enables you to make a start with the case study ideas straight away - the ideas I shall mention here will be for the more ICT confident, and for those who want to spend a bit of time exploring and innovating. The skills behind these ideas are not highly sophisticated - it is getting the base-product right from the educational point of view that takes the time. The suggestions here are, then:

• Hypertext in Word - using hypertext means that you can jump between parts of documents and between documents themselves, so that it is possible to create paths through models depending on which choices people make when presented with situations. In a fairly deterministic system such as economics or Business Studies theory, these models can cover a lot of the possible ground.
• Multiple Choice in PowerPoint - here you can use the same idea - hypertext - to give pupils binary or multi choices, and send them to new areas of response or investigation, depending on how they answer the questions that come up.
• Number-base Models in Excel - Excel not only crunches numbers, even if it does do this well. Because Excel can use images, text, hypertext and numbers together, it can be used to generate patterns and to illustrate patterns in areas where calculable inputs derive predictable outputs.

Now that you've looked at some of my ideas about the options available, you need to make your own choices. The teacher in the case study has decided to use all options excluding PowerPoint/Word/Excel self-created models, and to combine two or more in particular sessions over a two-week period. You need to plan to do something of this sort.

On the next page, make a copy and fill out the summary to help you get focus on what you will do. I've put in some suggestions - you can use these as you like. Think of some uses of your own, and make a short note on what you will have to do to make it work, what you expect the benefit to be to your pupils, and what difficulties you expect to encounter when you do it in the classroom.

Resources Selected for Work on Economic Factors