Every post on this blog is now searchable through a Gemini Notebook built for instructors. Instead of scrolling the archive or guessing at keywords, you can describe what you are teaching and get back the posts that fit.
Open the Accounting in the Headlines Gemini Notebook
It is free to use. If you are asked to sign in, a personal Google account works.
What it can do
Ask in plain language. You do not need keywords or search syntax.
It has read close to 400 posts published here since 2013, including the discussion questions, and it has been given information about each one: the accounting concepts it covers, the course and level it suits, roughly how long it takes, whether the questions call for calculation or judgment, and whether anything in it may need checking before you use it.
So you can ask for what you actually need:
- Find posts about inventory for introductory financial accounting.
- I have ten minutes at the start of class. Find a short activity about fraud.
- Which posts involve professional judgment rather than calculation?
- Find activities that work for an asynchronous online discussion.
- Give me three posts about cash flows and compare them.
- Which older posts are still useful for teaching the statement of cash flows?
- Find an activity where students could reasonably disagree.
It will usually come back with several options and explain how they differ, rather than handing you the first match.
It can also help once you have picked something. Ask it for discussion guidance on a particular post and it will lay out the concepts students should recognize, the facts they tend to miss, where the discussion can reasonably go, what they commonly get wrong, and questions you might ask next.
The more you tell it about your situation, the better it does. “Inventory posts” works. “Fifteen minutes at the end of class, my students just learned FIFO and LIFO, and I want a company they will recognize” works much better.
What it will not do
It does not give out answer keys. Many of the questions in these posts are written to produce discussion and judgment rather than one right answer, and I do not distribute prepared solutions. The notebook has none, cannot produce them, and will tell you so if you ask.
What it gives you instead is teaching support: the concepts, the tensions in the facts, the defensible positions students might take, the misconceptions to watch for, and follow-up questions. That is usually more useful in class than a key would be.
A few things to know
Check the dates. The archive goes back to 2013. The accounting concepts generally hold up, but the company figures are from the year each post was written, and some of the companies have been acquired or have gone private since. The notebook flags the age of a post and will tell you when something may need verifying. It has not fact-checked anything against current conditions, and it has not tested the external links.
Chapter numbers mean two different things. There is one chapter scheme for financial accounting and another for managerial. Chapter 7 is property, plant and equipment in one and cost-volume-profit in the other. Ask by topic name, or say which course you mean.
New posts take a few weeks to show up. I add new posts to the notebook every month or so, so the newest post on the blog may not be there yet.
Use the posts freely. As with the rest of this blog, you are welcome to use and adapt these activities in your teaching. Please keep the attribution, and link back to the original post where you can. Do not republish them or use them commercially. News articles linked from a post belong to whoever published them, so apply your usual copyright and fair-use practice to those separately.
Tell me how it goes
This is new, and I would like to know whether it is actually useful. If it recommends something odd, misses something obvious, or tells you anything that does not match a post, let me know.
Accounting in the Headlines 