Global Marketing Wall giving Life Ready Students a look at the global economy

A stock ticker display, wide screens and clocks set to times around the world are giving students at the Life Ready Center real world experience with stocks and trading.

Not to mention a lesson in reading analog clocks.

Adults and students at the Life Ready Center unveiled their Global Marketing Wall Thursday, a new concept that educators said is designed to give marketing students a better idea of the real world of reporting and trading stocks in the major cities around the globe. Formally defined as an international trading tool to encourage understanding about global industry and trade, the wall is the first thing visitors see when they enter the Life Ready Center and head across the commons area.

It was an educational tool two years in the making, said Life Ready Center Principal Charlotte Oates, about a concept that started with a $10,000 grant from the Laura Fields Foundation before growing to incorporate other funding sources. The result covered what Oates estimated was a $24,000 project to install a ticker display; three big screen televisions, displaying the Dow Jones 30 Industries, Top Livestock Products, and the S&P 500; and clocks displaying the time in seven of the world’s leading trade centers: New York City, London, Los Angeles, Chicago, Tokyo, Sydney and Hong Kong. The result, especially with the ticker, is an eye-catching display that is hard to look away from once you see it.

Oates, admitting she has been excited about the Global Marketing Wall for weeks, said her staff researched the concept and is pretty certain the Life Ready Center is the only high school in Oklahoma with one.

The placement of the Global Marketing Wall was deliberate, marketing teacher Kayla Pettit said about a project the marketing teachers strongly supported.

The cafeteria/commons area is the heaviest-used area of the campus, Pettit said, explaining many students gather there, so the wall is readily accessible — and visible — to them. That’s important because while the wall was designed to complement the Life Ready Center’s three marketing classes, it has a broader application to all students no matter what their educational disciplines.

Pettit said the initial idea was giving marketing students an actual look at something they had only seen described in words or depicted on YouTube videos.

“They were curious,” she said, explaining some students just couldn’t get their heads around the concept of a ticker because they had never seen one and now they can. “It’s here.”

So for the teacher, it’s a way to broaden student perspectives and get them thinking on a global scale. But, it’s not just marketing students who will benefit.

Pettit said agriculture students can see the direct result of what they are doing on global markets (one of the televisions displays livestock products). For others, it’s a chance to see that trading involves more than Fortune 500 companies. Pettit cited art as an example, explaining art is an investment — and one of the few investments that didn’t lose value during the recent economic downturn. It’s important for students in the arts to know that, she said.

Oates credits the teachers for the wall, saying it was her teachers who came to her more than two years ago with the idea.

“They wanted a global ticker,” she said, pointing to the result and noting that her three marketing teachers — Pettit, Daniel Billings and Greg Ford— are credited on a plaque. “We’re excited about it.”

Oates said the project is giving her students an important life lesson.

“It’s important that they know how to invest,” she said, adding she sees another distinct advantage for a generation who depends on digital means to tell time, meaning they can’t use “old school” means. “They’re analog clocks.”