As 2007 comes to a close, AP Econ students all over the world sit for their semester exams, teachers pour over papers in a mad rush to finish all their marking before the holiday break begins, and we in AP Economics at SAS begin to shift our focus from microeconomics to macroeconomics. Well, not so fast, we do have ONE more unit in Micro to cover.

As a re-cap on where we’ve come this year. Below are links to all the work our students here have done on their EduBlog Award winning wiki, “Welker’s Wikinomics”. Since school started in August, we’ve covered three of our four main units from Micro, including:

• Microeconomics Unit 1: Basic Economic Concepts
• Microeconomics Unit 2 A and B: Product Markets
• Microeconomics Unit 2 C and D: Product Markets
  
• Microeconomics Unit 3: Resource Markets

After the break, we’ll come back and spend about two weeks wrapping up micro. This is when we get to cover one of my personal favorite units, in which we study the environmental impacts of our economic system and learn about the possible solutions governments and societies face for minimizing the “spillover costs” of production. These and other topics will be learned in Unit 4: Market Failure and the Role of Government.

By the end of January we’ll begin our sixteen week adventure in macroeconomics. The unit outlines completed by last year’s AP students are still up to view on the wiki. Around mid-January, I will erase all the work done by last year’s students, in preparation for this year’s, who will begin working on our macro wiki and make it even bigger and better than the pages below! Here’s the units we’ll cover in macro:

• Unit 1: Measurement of Economic Performance
• Unit 2: Aggregate Demand / Aggregate Supply Mode
• Unit 3: The Financial Sector
• Unit 4 and 5: Inflation, Unemployment and Economic Growth
• Unit 6: Open Economy, International Trade and Finance

As for myself, I’m off for three weeks to the snowy slopes of the Pacific Northwest! A week in British Columbia’s Whistler and Blackcomb Mountains followed by two weeks at my own ski cabin in Sandpoint, Idaho. I don’t predict I’ll be doing much blogging or wikiing over the next three weeks, so this will probably be my last post until January. Please check back around January 9th for the next round of blog posts: the topic? Market failure and environmental economics, of course!

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

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About the author: Jason Welker is a teacher at Zurich International School in Switzerland, where he teaches Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate Economics. Jason was an international school student in Malaysia before studying economics at Seattle University then earning his Masters in Education. He calls Seattle and Northern Idaho home. In addition to maintaining an economics wiki and this blog for economics student and educators, Jason also gives presentations on using Web 2.0 tools in education at workshops and conferences around the world. His economics wiki won the 2007 "Best Educational Wiki" award from the "EduBlog Awards".

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