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And in the news today ….

13.Feb.08

Eric looks at business news this week and suggests ways in which it can be used in the classroom.

Eric looks at business news this week and suggests ways in which it can be used in the classroom.

As I was reading the news this week, two themes struck me for different reasons and both themes form excellent classroom material. So here’s what I found:

The first is about transport in general, and oil prices and air travel in particular. Here are four recent headlines:

Ryanair warns of profits 'storm'
Ryanair warns its profits will fall because of rising oil prices.
Strong profits at British Airways
BA announces its profits will rise despite rising oil prices.
Exxon Mobil reports record profit
Exxon Mobile reports record profits because of rising oil prices.
EU 'should ban inefficient cars'
The former chairman of Shell states that the EU should ban cars that do less than 35 miles to the gallon in order to curb oil consumption.

Between the four of these articles there are all kinds of activities you can do in the classroom:

Ask your students to compare the ‘spin’ the different companies put on oil prices. Do they portray the rise in costs in a positive way, or a negative one? Do they use them to their advantage or in a way that makes them look better, or in a way that makes someone else (the competition, the general economic situation) look bad?
How do the individual companies play the ‘eco-card’? Do they make any mention of the ecological consequences of oil production or consumption?
What vocabulary collocates with oil, and which words are frequently used in the various articles? Work on numbers, especially with the first two articles.
Analysis of business models and the marketplace. Why is Ryanair about to warn of losses while BA is about to post profits?

I’m sure you can think of more.

The next theme that was splashed all over the news this week was the fact that Microsoft had put in a bid to buy Yahoo. Here are some of the articles on this from very different newspapers:

There’s so much being written about this in so many papers that it’s hard to pass this one up as lesson-material. Here again are a few suggestions:

Ask students to read two or three of the selected articles and ask them to find the different points of view. Do the articles portray the possible buyout in a positive or negative light? How is this apparent in the article?
Analyse two or three of the articles for style. Is one more “high brow" than the other? How can you tell?
Compare the content of two or three of the articles. Are they the same? If not, why not? What difference do the different types of content have on the overall effect of the article?
Discuss the content itself, or have students prepare a presentation around one or more of the articles. Topic areas can be buyouts; mergers; hostile takeovers; the differences between the three; or the importance of this particular merger if students are in the IT field.

A particularly good week for news for the classroom I’d say – I hope this entry has given you a few tips for how some of those articles can be used!

All the best

Eric