Jerry Guttman has been teaching Business Education for over 30 years at Manheim Township High School in Central Pennsylvania. She teaches Accounting and Entrepreneurship courses in a computer lab with 28 PCs to grade 10, 11 and 12 students.
Despite being a fairly affluent community, as times have changed, so have the demographics of her students.
“As we become more diverse as a school, so too do our teachers strategies. Instruction to diversified learners has become a challenge”.
Jerry’s main project for her Entrepreneurship course involves writing a business plan for a startup company of her students’ choosing. Students typically work in teams of two or three to research various sections of the business plan on the Internet. The students would collate their findings into a word document and at the end of the course present their finished plan back to the class.
“In an effort to make this project more educational for diversified learners, I went looking on the Internet for something new and different that would encourage students to use their creativity to apply what they learned from their business plan research.”
Jerry discovered Biteslide whilst adding apps to her Google Chrome homepage and after experimenting with slidebooks, knew that she had found the alternative to writing a business plan that would be valuable to all types of learners.
“Using Biteslide’s collaborative features, my students have been able to continue working in teams to research the different sections of the business plans. Instead of just writing about it in the traditional way, they have been able to create visually interesting pages about each of the sections which they can present back and share with the rest of the class. This provided more meaning and made learning more fun for my students.”
Biteslide’s project management features made it easy to track the progress of her students’ work throughout the duration on the school project.
“I found it really helpful to be able to provide comments and feedback for improvements to their projects, directly alongside their work.”
The change in the way her students undertake project research has not only enabled Jerry to better integrate students with diverse learning backgrounds into school project work, but also provided a way for her students to create work that they are proud to show off to each other.
“With visual business plans, I am now able to print them off and hang them on my class room bulletin board to share my students’ project work.”
Having successfully integrated Biteslide as a learning tool for her students, Jerry plans to use it for a number of other projects including:
- Classroom introductions to help students get to know each other in a visual and fun way;
- Visual Learning using pictures to demonstrate the understanding of various Accountancy topics;
- And as a Vocabulary Aid, building a collaborative class slidebook of vocabulary for various terms relevant to the course.
And this is what Jerry’s class is saying about Biteslide…
“I love how easy it is to use, and will definitely tell my friends about it.”
Amber
“Biteslide is a creative and easy to way to make a visual, more interesting report, versus a boring a written report.”
Aubrey
“Biteslide was fun and easy to use.”
Sara
“Easier to present and easy to navigate.”
Brett
“I like using Biteslide more than writing an essay because it gives you more options. You can use it anywhere and it allows people to edit the project. I think that’s really a good feature.” Sokhema
Here’s a few examples of Jerry’s students’ Biteslide school project work: