Google Classroom by Mike Siekkinen

Are you and your students using Google Classroom? If you are in a school with one-to-one technology (all students have access to computers, chrome books, tablets, etc.) I highly recommend this application. Google Classroom is an easy-to-use virtual space where a teacher can post messages, assignments, links, etc. Virtually anything can be posted for your students. It's also an easy way to assign students work and they have the ability to turn things into the classroom. You can also grade assignments and post grades and give individual feedback to students. Very powerful and easy to use application at a great price- FREE! Google updates the platform frequently and there are lots of tutorials on the web to teach you how to use google classroom. 

Setup is easy. Sign in for the first time
1. Go to classroom.google.com and click Go to Classroom.
2. Enter your username and click Next.
3. Enter your password and click Next.
4. If there is a welcome message, read it and click Accept.
5. If you're using a G Suite for Education account, click I'm A Student or I'm A Teacher. ...
6. Click Get Started.

Google Classroom also allows you to personalize each classroom with a picture so as you are teaching a certain topic, you can add a background to your classroom related to your subject area. You also have the ability to post assignments ahead of time and have them become available for students on the date you select. Very handy when you may be away from the classroom and are leaving student work.

At the end of each year, I archive my classes and then start new classrooms for the new school year. The process is easy and allows you to keep student work from previous years to be able to show students good and bad examples of assignments. Also if there is ever a question about grades, you have the actual work done by the student. I find teaching 8th grade that my students now come to me familiar with how it works and I have to do virtually no “teaching” students how to operate within the application. In fact, many students show me new things that you can do! 

If you haven't tried it, give it a go!

Dr. Mike Siekkinen, a retired U.S. Navy submariner, became a teacher as a second career. He teaches history at St Marys Middle School as well as Adult and Career Education at Valdosta State in Georgia.

econlife - Throwback Thursday: When Google Was Just Google by Elaine Schwartz

#TBT: Today’s Google is the result of 270 acquisitions. Let’s look back at what it (and others like it) used to be and then forward to what we have now.


Google’s Growth Spurts

During the past 23 years, Google was first BackRub (very briefly), then Google (for close to 16 years), and now Alphabet. At first it was a unique search engine developed by two Stanford graduate students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Created in 1999, AdWords was an early idea that generated some of their first revenue. Five years later, slightly more than 19.6 million shares were sold publicly for $85 apiece through an IPO (Initial Public Offering).

An early homepage:

Since then, they’ve acquired 270 companies. Close to 63% of that total was for potential (and actual) competitors that included companies like Doubleclick (ads), YouTube (you know) and Waze (maps). Meanwhile 20% involved expanding into new areas like AI and robotics. The remainder is varied.

This NY Times graphic shows all of Google’s growth spurts. 2011 and 2014 were the most active acquisition years:

A Superstar Trend

As we look back to when Google was simply for search and now at its multiple identities, we see a trend in which fewer firms have more market power. Like Google, companies are getting larger. Goldman Sachs calls it the emergence of the superstars. According to Goldman Sachs research, the number of firms that trade in stock markets is down while their size is up. In 1996 there were 8000 listed firms; now there are closer to 4,000.

Our Bottom Line: Concentration

When economists talk about market power, they use the word concentration. In concentrated markets, there are fewer firms, they are large, they dominate sales, and they have some price making power. To quantify concentration, we can use a Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI). The higher the HHI number, the greater the concentration. The Index can be based on different scales but typically the closer to 10,000, the greater the concentration.

Below you can see concentration from 20 industry groups for firms that are listed in the S&P. Tobacco is at the top while Interactive Media and Services are a close second:

If 10,000 is at the top of the the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, then 10,000 equals a monopoly. To calculate the Herfindahl-Hirschman index number, we can square the market share of each firm and then add them together. So, if a company is the only competitor, then its sales are 100% of the industry. The square of 100 is 10,000. However, if you have 100 firms, each with 1% of the shipments in an industry (or the sales, or for banks, perhaps the deposits), the HHI is 100:

1² + 1² + 1² + 1² + 96 other 1² = 100

When the U.S. Department of Justice uses the HHI to evaluate a merger proposal, it considers less than 1500 competitive, 1500-2500 moderately concentrated, and more than 2500, highly concentrated. Thinking of Alphabet (and Facebook), you can see why “interactive Media and Services is so concentrated.

My sources and more: The NY Times column on concentration and a (gated) Goldman Sachs report created the perfect synergy. As a final step, you might want to learn more about the HHI in an article from the St. Louis Fed and from the Department of Justice guidelines.

Ideal for the classroom, econlife.com reflects Elaine Schwartz’s work as a teacher and a writer. As a teacher at the Kent Place School in Summit, NJ, she’s been an Endowed Chair in Economics and chaired the history department. She’s developed curricula, was a featured teacher in the Annenberg/CPB video project “The Economics Classroom,” and has written several books including Econ 101 ½ (Avon Books/Harper Collins). You can get econlife on a daily basis! Head to econlife.

econlife - A Dilemma: How Much to Pay for Our Privacy Protection by Elaine Schwartz

There is a doll whose name is Cayla. She has a pink skirt, a denim jacket, and a bluetooth connection. Like many toys, she can have a conversation with us.

While these dolls are all Caylas, their manufacturer says you can program in a new name:

But you won’t be the only one who knows her name.

Whatever we say to Cayla can be stored on a central server and then sold to anyone or any intelligence agency. The German government banned her because she violated their privacy laws.

For us also, Cayla is more than a toy. She takes us to the cost of protecting our privacy.

Privacy

Privacy History

We could say that we were concerned about privacy from people during the 19th century, from government in the 20th century, and now, from the corporation. Before the mid-19th century, privacy was not even a concern. The reason could have been that we had limited photography, no telegraph, no telephone.

The following Google Ngram search shows the word was not used very much in books until the 1960s:

Contemporary Privacy

A Google search, Amazon’s Siri, and a Facebook like all add to a data supply chain that lets corporations collect and sell data about our behavior. So too do our Smart phones, Smart cars, Smart dishwashers.

However, when told how much we share, our response to privacy protection is tepid. In a recent survey, 80% of the participants said they would want to protect themselves from their everyday technology but only 26% said they would pay for that protection. Asked if they would pay to see fewer online ads, 50% of the survey’s participants said no.

Our Bottom Line: The Cost of Privacy Protection

To understand why many of us are minimally concerned with privacy protection,  it might help to see its cost (economically defined as sacrifice) from two perspectives.

Collectively, the cost of losing our privacy is immense. Through our elections, our businesses, our personal and professional relationships, we can corrupt our basic institutions.

As individuals though, when we lose our privacy, life becomes easier. Our appliances work better, we remain in touch with our world, and toys are more fun.

So “bad” things happen as a society when we lose privacy but “good” things happen personally. You can see why we won’t pay to preserve our privacy. One by one, we cannot even fix the problem.

And perhaps that is why Germany banned Cayla. The only way we can and will pay for our privacy is together.

My sources and more: Thanks to a Crazy/Genius podcast on privacy for a good walk yesterday morning. Because of Crazy/Genius, I learned about Cayla the talking doll from the NY Times. As for the survey, it was reported by MarketWatch. And finally, you might enjoy (as did I) pondering what Justice Brandeis said about privacy.

Our featured image is from Pixabay.

Ideal for the classroom, econlife.com reflects Elaine Schwartz’s work as a teacher and a writer. As a teacher at the Kent Place School in Summit, NJ, she’s been an Endowed Chair in Economics and chaired the history department. She’s developed curricula, was a featured teacher in the Annenberg/CPB video project “The Economics Classroom,” and has written several books including Econ 101 ½ (Avon Books/Harper Collins). You can get econlife on a daily basis! Head to econlife.