Wall Street Survivor

I have been teaching about stock market investing as a major unit in my financial literacy course. It has sparked many ideas from my students as they are now looking at the world from a new perspective. My eighth graders are now looking at traffic as an opportunity to see how many cars are Toyota versus Honda. They are looking at what bags people are carrying around the mall. Some are doing research on MySpace to determine what is trending in the youth market. Trying to maintain the enthusiasm and momentum for my students, I wanted to integrate a technology component that will showcase all their research.

After researching several websites, Wall Street Survivor was the choice to use for my class. Wall Street Survivor allows you to create a private group for your class. I wanted to use the program to setup a fantasy stock trading group for our students to authentically explore investing. The website allows you to buy and sell stocks in real time and actually ranks your portfolio to everyone else in the group. It is a fun and engaging tool that keeps my students motivated learning more about stocks. I even added some of our staff members to join the game. The tool enhanced my lessons and provided my students real world experiences in investing. They even claim to pay teachers who use it, but yet heard back from them about that.