Tech stocks are up. Walmart plans to hire 150,000 new employees in China. Oil company profits are up but they will be called before congress. Ford just announced a major restructuring of their company. The Dow closed up today. These sound more like headlines from the Wall Street Journal than 4th grade math with Linda White. Welcome to “Wall Street meets Greenhill 4 th graders”.

Linda has been using the stock market as a math lesson for many years. Each year, she evaluates the prior years and works to change the lesson- improving the experience for the students and making it more relevant.

Five or six years ago, she added the dimension of live Internet access for research and Excel for tracking student checkbooks and stock performance. We setup a mini lab from some old laptops. It looked like a bird-nest of wires connecting them to the Internet. It is amazing how far we have come in these past 5 years.

This year, the entire project has been assembled in WebCT. Introducing her to WebCT, she developed the stock market project in WebCT. Students and parents now have access to all the files and materials- anytime, anywhere. Links to specific financial Internet sites are provided for the students. These sites have been augmented with RSS feeds that monitor specific sites for the latest financial news.

All eighty-six 4 th graders have been divided into groups of four across sections of the class. This means that each group contains members from at least three different classes. These groups then communicate with the other members asynchronously through the discussion tool. While students are provided with time to work in the new computer lab, many are accessing their class site from home during the evening and weekend hours.

Students use these discussions forums to share information related to business news and discuss the stocks they will purchase. Each Friday, they buy and sell stocks based on their discussions through the week. Stock performance, transactions and their checkbooks are tracked through Excel.

Linda has structured the project as a game that will run for several months. The game ends when the stock market crashes. The date of the crash is known only to Linda and she’s not telling! At the end of the game, students will graph their stock performance and determine profit/loss.

The stock market game has provided an exciting, engaging and authentic learning experience that reaches beyond the classroom.

Use the credentials below to enter the world of the 4 th grade stock market game and see what all the kids are talking about.

Log in at http://webct.greenhill.org
Login name: stockguest
Password: money

Click on the blue link to the 4 th grade stock market class.