Forward thinking students

Here is how forward thinking my students are at Reading High School...

TeenDollars
Over the past few years my students have written a marketing plan, a business plan, and populated TeenDollars full of useful financial literacy content. Our goal is to help teens with the financial choices they make now. Recently one of my business classes wrote a social media plan to grow our influence. Here were some of my favorite ideas they generated...

• TeenDólares - A spanish version of TeenDollars. We are still looking into the right people to follow and are open to suggestions. We have two brilliant Spanish teachers willing to use this as a interdisciplinary activity for students to translate what we are trying to say into Spanish. We hope to begin tweeting in the next couple of weeks.
• By the way, a past student developed our TeenDollars logo and has since graduated. I asked him to develop the TeenDólares logo which he did (above).
• InstaGram - We started an Instagram account and will send charts, graphs, and pictures that link to financial literacy stories. Why? Some kids like pictures better, some kids are visual learners, and it is another communication channel. Again - - their ideas.
• BufferApp - Use BufferApp to tweet during lunch and after school. This is when kids are most likely to read them. BufferApp also provides a very useful analytics tools that allows us to track the times and stories people like the most.
• TeenDollars Twitter - Connect stories to famous athletes and entertainers. This is why we posted the recent 30for30 short film "Broke" on our front page and tweeted about Alan Iverson losing everything after making $150 million in the NBA.
• Create a TeenDollars Remind101.
• Continue to focus on content that is relevant to teens now.
• College funding, car loans, apartments, auto insurance, student bank accounts, building credit, electronic banking services, etc
• TeenDollars Tribune - We are going to publish a Paper.li with sections including consumerism, sports, entertainment, and financial education. As you can see, we have already pulled together a draft.

Finally, many thanks to MoneyTrail.net and RaisingCEOKids.com for their sponsorship. As I have mentioned in a previous post, our school has lost 28% of our funding from previous years. So through their sponsorship we can host this website. If you are interested in becoming a TeenDollars sponsor, please contact me at bpage@readingschools.org.

Along those lines, I started a $500 initiative last year to provide one student who, based on criteria, can best illustrate why a financial education is important to them and society. The $500 goes toward opening their first IRA. If you are interested in matching my contribution so I can award two students this year, I would be glad to share with you the specifics of the award criteria. Obviously you would be added as a TeenDollars sponsor. Please contact me at bpage@readingschools.org if you are interested.