Back to school shopping survival guide

Back to school shopping can be quite stressful, especially if you have multiple children to shop for. There are so many items that children need for school that it can be difficult to keep track of all the items that you need to shop for. It is important that you supply your children with what they need for school without breaking your budget. You can make your back to school shopping less stressful so that you can focus on getting your children prepared for the new school year. With careful planning, you could even save yourself some money by shopping the sales.

First of all, you need to obtain a list of school supplies that you children will need, if available. Some schools with give their lists to local stores, or even have them available online. This typically applies to elementary aged children, but for middle school and high school it will all depend on what classes they are taking. In middle school and high school they will need a lot of notebooks, folders, pens, and a good back pack for general supplies. Some class specific items they may need would be art supplies or a scientific calculator.

Get exactly what is required on the list. Some schools get pickier and ask for certain brands and I would recommend that you abide by them, because they choose a specific brand for a reason, and it would be terrible if you had to purchase another one later on. For children who are in middle school and high school, you will want to make sure you purchase plenty of notebooks, filler paper, folders, pens and pencils. Math classes can require basic calculators or scientific calculators, which can be a large purchase. Check for sale on these types of items.

Make sure that your children have something to carry their items home with, such as a backpack. Most schools frown upon backpacks that have wheels on them, so you will want to stay away from them. This is a way to get your child excited for the back to school season is by bringing them to the store to shop with you, and allowing them to choose items in your price range. Bringing the items home for them can be discouraging in their eyes. Also shop early and shop sales. There are many items that you can get at huge discounts when you shop the weekly sales at your major retail stores such as Walmart and Target.

Start shopping for clothing and shoes shortly after they get out of school. If you want to shop for the best prices, the early bird gets the worm. Selections get terrible the closer to the school season it is, so shopping early really pays off. Set each child on a budget for school shopping, and let them know if they want that expensive pair of jeans, they are going to get less clothes. This also helps children learn how to spend money properly. Shop discount stores to maximize your savings.

Go to school orientation with your child. This will help them get pumped for the school season by seeing some of their old friends, and it may also calm a child's nerves when starting in a new school. You can help them find their classes and even meet their teachers. These tips will help you survive the back to school shopping and get your children off on the right feet.

The Average Salary of Entry Level BSN

A BSN is a nurse who has successfully completed a four-year bachelor of science in nursing degree. BSNs are employed as hands-on caregivers in hospitals and schools, and as teachers or admi nistrators. Among the factors that affect a BSN's salary are experience, location and employer type. A BSN holds a bachelor of science in nursing degree. Entry Level Salary A BSN who has been employed less than one year earns a median yearly salary of $49,851, as of September 2010 according to the PayScale website. Experienced Salary PayScale data also show that a BSN's salary increases to $56,270 with one to four years of experience; with five to nine years of experience that pay can rise to about $63,051 a year. After 10 to 19 years BSN's can earn about $66,576 a year; and with 20 or more years of experience, the BSN salary is about $70,733 per year, as of September 2010. Location Considerations The salaries for BSNs vary among states. A BSN employed in Ohio earns a median salary of $62,347, whereas in California, the median salary is $79,603 per year, according to PayScale in September 2010. Employer Considerations Schools or school districts are one of the lower-paying employers; the median salary is $44,206 per year. One of the higher-paying positions is working in a hospital; the median salary is $65,838. These figures reflect data from PayScale as of September 2010. Source: http://www.ehow.com/facts_7194481_average-salary-entry-level-bsn.html Related link http://world-edu.info/average-salary-for-bsn-degree/

Homeschool unit study - beginning money and economics

Teaching young children about money and economics is an important part of every education. This homeschool unit study is designed for young children in kindergarten or first and second grades. Not only does it teach the homeschool child to recognize and count both coins and paper money, it will teach them how to manage their money effectively.

Beginning economics homeschool unit study covers basic supply and demand, profits and loss, and budgeting.

Money and Economics Vocabulary

The homeschool unit study should include the names of monetary units such as penny, nickel, dime, quarter, and dollar. Also include general finance terms like money, save, spend, and budget. Build the vocabulary and spelling list based on the grade level of your student.

Money and Economics Reading and Writing

Any library books about money or finances would be great for the homeschool unit study on money and finances. Some popular titles include: "The Coin Counting Book," "Funny Money," and "The Story of Money." Search the catalog at your local library for more. Any of these books would provide a great opportunity to write a basic fiction or non-fiction book report.

Your child might also like to read a book about the early systems of trade such as bartering, the National Mint where money is made, and stories about owning a shop or starting their own business. Writing a business plan for something simple like a lemonade stand is good practice.

Money and Economics Math Skills

When working with money and economics, math skills come into play a lot. While you can find money worksheets to print out for your homeschool unit study, it might be more fun to use real world examples. Go to a store and let your child add up the purchase prices to see what the total cost will be. Or set up a pretend store at home and your homeschool child can purchase toys or other items.

Money and Economics Arts and Crafts

The money and economics homeschool unit study can be rounded out by creating your very own piggy bank to save money in. Use a large plastic jar, four empty thread spools, a milk bottle top and some construction paper. Glue the spools on one side of the jar for the pig's legs. The milk bottle top should be glued onto the plastic jar lid as the pig's nose. Use the construction paper to make pig ears and a curly tail. A grown up can cut a slot in the top of the pig for the money to be put in.

P.E.O. International Peace Scholarship

Announcing an opportunity for substantial financial support for international female graduate or PhD students. The award is called the International Peace Scholarship (I.P.S.) and it is sponsored by a nonprofit organization called P.E.O. (Philanthropic Educational Organization). P.E.O. offers five projects, of which I.P.S. is one.



It is our fondest hope that by helping educate future leaders in other countries we can in some small way foster goodwill, understanding and peace in the world.

The scholarship is up to $10,000 and is renewable one time only. Any current female international student (who has at least one academic year remaining upon receipt of the scholarship in May) is eligible. Also, any newly accepted student, even if she has not yet matriculated, is eligible.

Note that the preliminary application must be filed by December 15th. Applications are available at: www.peointernational.org. Click on the link on the left-hand top of the screen entitled About P.E.O. and its Projects; then International Peace Scholarship Eligibility Form pdf. (Note that the form will become available on August 15th.)



Awards are based on a budget, which the International office uses to determine need. If she qualifies, based on need, P.E.O. International will mail her the full application packet. The budget need not be substantiated until after the student is selected to receive the full application. Selected students submit the full application by January 31st. The scholarship is based not only on need, but also leadership qualities and academics.

Feel free to contact the Chair if you have any questions or concerns about IPS.

Dot Matthews

P.E.O. Chapter A, Atlanta

Chair, International Peace Scholarship

www.peointernational.org

Students Worldwide Are Learning How To Excel In School From Home

Today, children are expected to earn high grades in all of their classes, in spite of the failing public school system. Parents can still remember when an education was essential in preparing children for their livelihood.

Now what many public school systems offer is overcrowded classrooms. Teachers are being grossly underpaid for their skills and overworked. Outdated learning material, metal detectors, violence, cuts in federal spending for education...

Remedial help is sorely needed for some students so they can keep up. If a child can't receive the education they deserve, how are they expected to prosper in society? Parents, students, and the public school systems already know that this is a huge problem, but who can they turn to for help?

More and more parents are turning to tutoring to supplement their children's education and to further their children's abilities to be successful in the future.

Tutoring is a $4 Billion business that is growing steadily. Under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, supplemental educational services are funded by school districts with a portion of their allocation from the U.S. Department of Education.

The Federal Government allocates as much as $1800 per eligible student, but so far, less than 10 percent of eligible students are electing to participate, according to providers' estimates.

One of the toughest challenges is simply convincing parents that the service is free to them. Parents will often hang up when sales reps for tutoring firms call to explain the program.

They think it is a scam because "free" usually means too good to be true. And sometimes parents simply don't want to acknowledge that their child needs help. Parents have been known to ask "What's wrong with my child that he needs to be tutored?"

In spite of these challenges, online tutoring, or Interactive Distance Learning (IDL) is expected to grow at an unprecedented rate. IDL is where a student receives live, one-on-one tutoring in a virtual classroom setting or in large group sessions over a video conferencing system.

Students who have access to a computer at home or in school can log in to the system and have a live tutor help them day or night. Subjects like Math, English, Calculus, World History, Latin, French, Chemistry, Physics and many others can be taught to them by certified tutors/teachers.

And there are online tutoring systems that even supply their own courseware library, featuring some of the finest programmed learning courses in computer sciences, management and academic subjects.

Children who receive one-on-one remedial tutoring have been known to have increased self-esteem and self confidence, increased focus and lengthened attention span.

My advice to parents everywhere is to find an online tutoring system that focuses on academic remedial courses for ages K-12, as well as for college students.

Why not give your child the best chance at passing each class with the help he or she needs? There's federal money allocated for the parents to provide online remedial help for their children. Also, parents are able to schedule tutoring sessions to fit into their time schedule.

In the long run, everyone shares in the child's accomplishment.

The Effects of Uncivil Political Theatre

The recent debate in Washington over increasing the national debt ceiling has brought the issue of civility front and center again. Although Congress was able to hammer out an eleventh-hour legislative compromise, the process was anything but civil. Noticeably lacking in the debate was any semblance of mutual respect for diverse ideas or meaningful consensus. Instead competing factions used the political process to vilify each other and try to score political points.  

According to a Washington Post/Pew Research Center poll released on Monday, 75 percent of the people polled were disturbed by the behavior of politicians during the budget negotiation process. The top five words used to describe the process were ridiculous, disgust, stupid, frustrating, and poor. Other adjectives included terrible, disappointing, and childish. Interestingly, the dissatisfaction expressed in the poll was consistent among people of all political persuasions. Michael Muskal of the Los Angeles Times noted that Ӏthe only good thing about this poll was that the battle seems to have brought people together.Ԁ

What affect does political incivility have on people? Bryan Gervais argues that political incivility Ӏbreeds distrustԀ and Ӏsubstantially lower views of opposing sidesԀ (see The Effects of Incivility in News Media on Political Deliberation) According to Gervais people exposed to uncivil media tend to Ӏmirror that incivility.Ԁ When uncivil political discourse receives extensive media coverage, as was the case for the debt ceiling debates, it essentially Ӏlegitimizes the use of uncivil language and behavior.Ԁ 

Perhaps the incivility in Washington contributes to our own civility struggles. Are we mirroring the behavior of our elected leaders and political pundits? With so many American outraged by the dysfunctional political conduct in Washington, this is a good time to reflect on what it means to be civil, especially in high-pressure situations. Can meaningful consensus be achieved when people with drastically different ideologies work together? Clearly the model of leadership we witnessed over the past weeks has left many wanting to see less mudslinging and more civility. 

Kent M. Weeks  

Canvas Discussions; Chuck and Martin and the 80/20 Rule

Earlier this week, Instructure hosted their first international conference. I expected mostly Utah people but there were attendees from all over the U.S. including one person from a school in Toronto. In keeping with Postman's first rule of technological change I don't want to be an evangelist for any LMS but I will say that the conference did a good job of disarming me. The conference, in many ways reminded me of early Sakai conferences in Baltimore and Vancouver. There was real energy in the air and I left with a sense of belonging to a close knit community of users who are listening to each other. Whether Canvas can sustain this as it grows will be interesting. Josh Coates (Instructure's head honcho) alluded to this in a question and answer session when someone in the audience asked him, "What is your primary strategic focus in the next three years?" Josh responded that a year ago there were only seven employees in Instructure, that today there are 45 and that next year, at present rates of growth, there will be upwards of 140 (not to mention how many more schools there are likely to be using the product). Given those numbers Josh asked "How do you grow?" Hopefully, from our perspective, in a way where we still feel like we're still playing a role in determining our own technological destiny.

To that concern of controlling destiny, during the closing BBQ, I had a chance to talk with Brian Whitmer who cofounded the company with Devlin Daley during (or perhaps directly after) a grad stint at BYU. For the most part I've really liked teaching in Canvas but I did ask him whether there were any plans to supplement the way they've chosen to set up discussion boards with other more traditional approaches. Instructure chooses an option that Moodle calls "Display replies flat, with oldest first" whereas I prefer "Display replies in threaded form" or "Display replies in nested form." (The links, by the way, take you to a Moodle hosted discussion where participants are discussing the relative merits of Moodle versus Canvas.) We didn't talk long enough for me to understand completely what Brian has found problematic in the nested and threaded forms, but I think he thinks that students often won't drill down as much as instructors would like them to -- which would mean that the potential advantages of nested and threaded approaches might not really pay out in practice. To keep this post short, I won't weigh the respective merits of these approaches except to speculate that there are enough users who like the traditional approach that it may merit including it as an option, even if Brian wants to keep the flat approach as the default.

Certainly, this is the strategy Moodle has chosen. Since there is a division among users, rather than choosing just one, Moodle provides users with choice. Interestingly, there's a short video of Dr. Chuck (former Executive Director of Sakai) interviewing Martin precisely about this challenge. Here is the transcription:

Dr. Chuck (aka Charles Severance): Is there ever been a situation where the community has mildly revolted where you thought X and a whole bunch of people thought Y and they sort of ran away with it? Or have you been in front of it the whole time?

Martin Dougiamas: It's been pretty good....occasionally when something's been put in there as a pedagogical feature....what usually happens with this sort of stuff is we talk about it we decide there's two camps and so we create an option and people can make a choice but the default value for that choice is always mine. I always try to make Moodle out of the box behave like the way I want it to behave.

And if you want to see the speech in full check out the actual video at minute 2:30

As I recall from our conversation, Brian mentioned the 80/20 rule but when I pressed him on it, he wouldn't say definitively that 80 percent of users prefer the "Display replies flat, with newest last." This isn't to say that the Instructure guys haven't already given all of this a lot of thought (in a story that is rapidly becoming mythic Brian and Devlin toured the country in a car without air-conditioning gathering user requirements at a ton of schools before actually coding anything). So it's possible I'm wedded to an anachronistic outdated approach that isn't worth including because of the clutter it would cause. And in fact, Brian, does have a point. I may miss Moodle's approach but it's certainly not enough of a frustration that I'll stop using Canvas because of it. Still, I'm writing it here so it matters at least a little to me. What do other people think? With respect to this little microcosm of Canvas are there any refinements that could be made to discussions? If so what are they?