Education | Education Safeguard

Ways to Make Learning Interesting

Sometimes it’s difficult for a teacher to understand how the subject they are teaching could bore someone, especially if it’s a subject that they themselves are very passionate about. Especially if there is a large age gap between you and your students, though, you need to adjust your curriculum a bit if you want to capture students’ attention.

Here are some tips on making your teaching — both subjects and teaching style — more interesting to your students.

Make it fun. There’s no easier way to lose a student’s interest than to pick a focus topic that is dry; try to pick something that a young person will find at least a little interesting. For example, if you teach English, assigning everyone essays about ecology for eight weeks will not win you any popularity contests. A study topic like popular fiction would do just as well for testing students’ ability to write essays in good English, and would hold interest much better.
Make it relavent to your students. If you teach seniors, perhaps golf and cooking would be good choices for study topics. If you teach teenagers, try popular musical artists. If you teach something like math, try making a word problem about Justin Bieber and see how quickly they pay attention! Even tuning into direct.tv to a popular reality tv show, and having an open discussion about it for a popular culture assignment will excite them, and keep them interested.
Mix it up. Don’t do the same thing every week — eight weeks of one study topic will lose almost anyone’s interest, while a different topic each week will switch often enough to keep people from losing interest. Just don’t mix it up too often, or students might forget what they learned last week before they can do the test about it!

Filed Under: Teaching Advice Tagged With: Education, Justin Bieber, Student

Teaching Tips for Learning Disabled Children

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Many teachers come encounter working with students with special needs and may need to make special changes to make sure all students receive the best possible education and reach their greatest potential. Disabled students often need differentiated instruction to accommodate their specific learning abilities. Here are some tips and strategies:

Create short and concise activities as often as possible to make it simpler for learning disabled children.
Provide children with concrete objects and events such as things they can see, hear, touch, and smell. This will reduce the difficulty of abstract concepts.
Provide repeated progress checks to let learning disabled children know how well they are doing on a particular task or goal.
Provide immediate feedback to allow children to quickly see the correlation between teaching and understanding.
Provide a lot of specific praise on a particular task, make sure to directly link comments to the activity such as, “I like the way you organized the crayons in the box.”
Provide oral instruction for children with reading disabilities. For example, present reading materials and tests in an oral way so the activity is not influenced by the lack of reading ability.
Plan to repeat instructions and offer information in both verbal and written formats to help learning disabled children use as many as their sensory abilities as possible.
Promote cooperative learning activities as much as possible. Ask students with varying abilities to work together on a certain task or toward a common goal and create an environment that facilitates a community of learners.

Filed Under: Education, Study Tips Tagged With: Disability, Education, Learning disability

Hands-on Learning Captures Students’ Attention

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Teaching today has fallen into a predictable pattern of book learning, lectures, tests and essays. Younger children love school and learning, then when they hit second or third grade they start to think of learning and homework more as chores than adventures like they used to. The difference is that teaching styles change around these grades. The focus shifts from capturing a child’s imagination to putting them to the test.

The hands-on approach of early education could do a lot to improve the outlook of older students. This isn’t to say that high schoolers should get out the craft glue, glitter and macaroni they used in preschool, but what if they had more classes that involved video, audio, and getting up out of their chairs? The tendency to sleep through class, disrespect the teacher, and ignore the subject they are studying would decrease.

If you are a teacher, try the hands-on approach. The trouble with getting kids to learn has never been about what they are learning, only the way that it is taught, and it’s your job as the teacher to make your lessons engaging and interesting enough to hold students’ attention. While many schools believe that test scores will improve with more book learning, the opposite seems to be true — the more schools focus on memorization and book learning, the less informations tudents truly retain. Instead they simply memorize the answers long enough to pass the test.

Hands-on learning creates a mind-body connection through stimulation of the senses that imprints the information into the mind, allowing the student to remember the information better. Ultimately, isn’t long-term learning what we’re aiming for?

Filed Under: Teaching Advice Tagged With: Education, Standardized test, Teacher

Is Online School Good For Grades 1-12?

Three girls using the computer at the grand op...

Image by San Jose Library via Flickr

When people talk about attending school online, they almost always mean online college or university. What the average person may not know is that online classes are offered by many different schools for grades 1 through 12 as well. Online schooling is very helpful for children who have long-term illnesses or a serious disability, as well as those who live somewhere remote and cannot reach a school campus in-person to attend classes.

These are cases where online school has an obvious superiority over traditional in-person school, though; some parents also enroll their child in online schooling to prevent bullying, peer pressure and the like. This is less about necessity about more about preference, and it brings to light the question of whether online schooling is good for kids.

Online classes, while great for college students who would be doing a similar style of book learning even in their in-person classes, lack the hands-on and interactive qualities that many younger children need in order to maintain interest in the subject they are learning about. Also, the first few grades of school are important times to develop social skills by interacting with other children, and with teachers.

On the other hand, online school allows children who would spend most of their time being bullied or worrying that other kids might not like them to instead focus on their schoolwork, so it’s a situation with both pros and cons. It seems like a compromise is the best solution: enroll your child in book learning courses, such as math, online, and physical courses like art and sports in-person for a good healthy balance of quality learning time and socializing.

Filed Under: Online Learning Tagged With: Education, elearning, Virtual school

How to Have a Successful College Career

Many students see college as a time to party and have fun — a last hurrah before becoming a real adult with a full-time job, spouse, and 2.5 kids. But there is so much more to college than fun and if you take it seriously, you’re sure to have a successful college career. Here are some tips to help you find success.

Find Internships

Once you decide on your career path, find internships that will get you closer to your dream job. Use resources at your school to find internships in your area and take advantage of the summer breaks to find internships located in other parts of the country. If you don’t see an internship available at a company that you’re interested in, contact the company directly and inquire. If you offer your services through an unpaid internship, you might get the experience you’re looking for, which is worth way more than the money you’d make working at a retail store or restaurant during the summer.

Take Online Courses

One way that you can get through school successfully is through online courses. These courses, through sites such as elearners.com, will give you flexibility in your schedule, which is especially important if you have an internship or job during the school year.

Network

While you’re in school, take the opportunity to network with other students who want to work in the same industry. These contacts will help later on when you’re looking for jobs.

There are so many opportunities available while you’re in college that you won’t have once you’re out, so be sure to take advantage of them to be successful.

Filed Under: Education, Higher Education, Study Tips Tagged With: College football, Education, Full-time, Intern