Strategic Education - Resources by Matthew Parsons

Built new from the ground up specifically for the new syllabus, with the first edition available from January 2022. Product details:

• ISBN: 9780645327526
• Pages: 441
• Price: $90. $99 from October 2023
• First edition, 2022
• QR code enabled? Yes
• Bespoke website for book for use on computers and mobile devices? Yes
• Full colour? Yes
• Quizlet flashcards? Yes
• Online workbook? No
• Chapter review answers? No
• Digital resources to support current issue investigations? Yes
• Author: Matthew Parsons

Strategic Commerce is not an update of an old syllabus book for the new syllabus, but a ground up fresh look at the teaching of Commerce for the new syllabus in NSW.

Not a cartoonised approach to commerce

One of the challenges with textbooks for Year 9 and Year 10 cohorts is to meet them at their emerging level of sophistication, and not to juniorise the content and approach. Additionally,the focus with Strategic Commerce has been to feature and focus on the syllabus content, rather than somewhat of a blizzard of case studies and interupting elements which prevents students understanding the landscape and elements of what they are learning.

The goal is for students to engage with and master the content, and understand how it relates to the Stage Six subject selections of Economics, Business Studies and Legal Studies. This means that the correct language is used in Commerce for concepts that the students will encounter in the HSC courses.

Supporting student active research not simplistic reading, comprehension

A feature of the new syllabus is several elements which require students to actively engage, research and report, and the textbook in these areas avoids providing the answers to students (for example in the process for jury selection in NSW), but instead educates students about how to conduct research in order to locate and process that material. This is a common feature of the approach to the end of chapter current issue research where the content is located on the bespoke website for each chapter in the form of digital resources and links to curated search results which the students can traverse and engage with.

QR code enabled with videos, explanations and simulations

One of the key features of Strategic Commerce is the way QR codes appear in the printed text which provide access to a range of additional carefully selected or constructive resources. In some cases, the QR code is linked to appropriate video or other content on the interenet, or it may link to narrated explanations of the content or graphics in the text. In the case of statistical graphs and data, the QR codes link to updated graphs and statistics. In the commerce context, a range of outstanding materials have been provided by government and government institutions, which have therefore been leveraged in the text to make it easier for location and usage by teachers and students. A complete list of the QR codes for each chapter appears in the web page for the chapter on the bus spoke website.

Digital resources made easy to access and use

The bespoke website approach enables very easy access to content by teachers and students. Using the code in the front of the textbook, students and teachers have a one time authentication process and thereafter do not need to login with passwords or usernames, which applies both to mobile devices as well as to their computers. It is suggested that teachers and students add a bookmark for the bespoke website for the book to their bookmarks bar in their browser and also to the home screen on their mobile device or phone. This means that when the QR codes are used, the target resource is opened without any requirement for authentication or passwords.

In order to somewhat keep the weight down, given that the book covers two years content, the material for Towards Independence is not in the printed volume, but the chapter pdf and other resources will be available on the website.