2008 Utah CTE Conferences

Posted by Morgan Vandagriff on 17 June 2008 | 1547 Comments

Last week we spent three days in Davis County, Utah with Utah’s business and financial literacy educators. Aside from having a ton of fun speaking with Utah’s brightest, we introduced Banzai Education Edition in case loads of jars. Banzai Education was designed to give teachers the ability to have their students manage their personal finances, and most importantly learn to save and spend wisely.

As part of our presentation at the conference, we felt it appropriate to provide a little imagery. We bought hundreds of Kerr canning jars and filled them with dollar bills - and then gave them all away. This little gimic (if you can call it that) gave us the chance to speak with teachers across the state of all sorts of disciplines about their varying needs for resources to teach financial literacy.

Preparing for the conferences, we concluded that most importantly to us, attending the conferences would be a learning experience.  Many of our suppositions about what educators are yearning for in financial literacy have been proven right. A few of those insights are as follows:

1. Teachers want something new.
2. Teachers want to adapt their curriculum to a generation on the web.
3. Students are in need learning experiences that last a lifetime.
4. Educators are keenly aware of our nations financial literacy gap.
5. Students want to learn about money.