Education Articles from College Matching Service

You may consider it impossible to complete your assignment if you have to submit your essay just the next day, and you only have the entire night left .You may bee feeling depressed thinking, how you can start with it, at all.

• Splash water in your eyes if you are feeling sleepy: Be relaxed. Go and splash water in your eyes. Have a cup of hot coffee if you are still feeling sleepy. This will help you to stay awake and concentrate in your work all night.

• Be patient: Do not panic. This will increase your tension. Sort out what you have to do. Plan how you are going to execute the entire essay within next three hours time. Time management with a proper planning can help you to deliver a good essay.

• Meditate for five minutes: To increase concentration at this hour, meditate for five minutes. Close your eyes and try to concentrate.

• Start with your essay writing: Now start your essay writing. Follow the following tips to deliver a good college essay.

• Have a good night sleep: After you have completed with your essay have a good night sleep. Sound sleep is very important to concentrate in your college lessons the next day.

Steps to write a good essay

• Topic selection:

To write a good essay, the first thing you need to do, is to choose a good topic. If the topic is already given to you, then you need not bother about the topic selection. Basically, whatever be the topic, if you can justify it properly then you can compose a good essay, devoid of the subject matter.

• Arrange points:

As soon as you have collected points on a topic, try to arrange them logically. Unless you display your thoughts in a logical manner your essay cannot be a good one.

• Expression:

Use those words which can express your thoughts in the best possible manner.

• Logical progression:

Link up your thoughts and express them rationally. There should be continuity of thought between sentences and paragraphs. Overall, the entire essay should be a complete structure.

If you follow these tips, no wonder you can compose the best essay in your class, within three hours at the night time.

There you are, at the foot of a mountain wondering what you are going to do in the future.

You have ideas, thoughts, plans, aspirations, motivations, and dreams. You see the world as your playground; obstacles and oppositions are at a minimum. You are surrounded by people just like yourself who have similar interests and thoughts. You are in a constant state of a creativity flux. One day you meet an eccentric recluse with an idea of how to revolutionize the slow cooking movement in your hometown, the next you meet a cross country runner who practices 4 times a day, counts calories, believes warm-ups are sexy, and thinks of nothing more than the feeling she gets at mile 25.

The greatest thing about college is the fact that it is designed to nurture and develop. Design and nurture what you may ask? That is limitless, but often limited by the focus of the college or the imagination of the student.

Take it from me, once you graduate, your access to the university is severely limited.

The best time to pursue any type of entrepreneurial quest is while you are a student at a university. Do not spend your time hatching the “perfect” plan, instead, move your idea out the door as quickly as possible. Get your idea in front of faculty members. Find faculty that have an entrepreneurial background. Email your universities newspaper, radio station, tv station, or even their public relations department. A university is filled with people who can help you take an idea through to the launch of the end result.

Think about all the things you have going for you as a student with an idea:

1. Being in debt up to your eye balls has very few advantages, but one of them is that it affords you the time you would have otherwise spent on a dead-end job.
2. Every large university has everything a business needs to succeed.
3. You are paying to attend the university, so naturally the majority of faculty feel like they owe you something (if only a little).
4. An atmosphere that naturally fosters creativity even if it wasn’t designed for it.
5. Spectacular access to a brilliant pool of labor.
6. General lack of real-world responsibility.

Greg McAdoo spoke at the Startup School 2008 and gave a great analogy about surfers and startups. He said, and I am paraphrasing, that the greatest surfers in the world don’t make their own waves. They don’t go against the waves, they choose the right wave and ride it perfectly. And that is what a great founder has to do.

So my challenge to you is simple.

Find your huge wave and ride it with passion, conviction, and courage.

Twitter Education – Twitter as an Educational Resource

College Matching Service (CMS) has been exploring the education value of Twitter. We found a couple interesting resources while researching education on Twitter, or Twitter Education.

Twitter has what is referred to as a “firehose” of information. With hundreds of thousands of people sending status updates every hour, there is a large amount of data on Twitter that is of value.

To find the education data, you have to perform the proper searches. Once you do so, you can find Twitter users that you wish to follow, or you can save the Twitter search that produces the most accurate results.

Finding Scholarships on Twitter

Recently CMS has been exploring scholarships online. We’ve found that there are very few valuable scholarship resources that are easy to find. The more precise your scholarship search the more fragmented the results become. For example, if you’re looking for classical music scholarships in Colorado, it is going to be very difficult to find something that you qualify for.

What we decided to do was develop a scholarship tool that would help users by limiting their choices. For example, if you’re looking for classical music scholarships, we allow you to select music scholarships. What people don’t often realize is that most music scholarships offered will also include classical music under the umbrella of acceptable programs. Therefore, by directing our users with the scholarship tool, we often achieve a higher success rate in getting scholarships for our visitors.

Of course we provide this tool free of charge. Our goal is to bring thousands of scholarships into one tool that will allow visitors to quickly and easily find a scholarship and apply for it.

Mashing up content for Twitter.

We’ve been coordinating our efforts for scholarships through our Twitter account ScholarshipsUSA. Through unique tools we have developed especially for scholarships on Twitter, we have been posting scholarships on a daily basis to our Twitter account. Everytime we post a scholarship to our website, it gets posted to our Twitter account.

We have also tagged this posting with the hashtag “#scholarship” which will allow people to find it with a scholarship search on Twitter.

Which brings me to my first recommended resource, performing a search for #scholarship on Twitter.

Let me be the first to warn you that you may find results where people are simply promoting their “product” and are not interested in helping you find scholarships. If you have ever heard the term bait & switch, that is a lot of what you will find on Twitter.

So how do I know what is valuable and what isn’t on Twitter?

Usually it doesn’t hurt to checkout anything on Twitter, but for the sake of saving time, here are a few tips to look for:

• If someone is linking to their root website domain, such as http://MyWebsite.com, they are probably just trying to drive traffic to their website, and not provide value to you.
• Look for a shortened link in the Tweet. If there is no link, chances are it is not a valuable resource for you. (bit.ly, 9mp.com, tinyurl.com)
• Beware of results where the same user posts 8-10 times in a row. This could be spam.
• If they don’t have a custom profile image on Twitter, chances are they are spammers.
• Look for something related in their Twitter username, such as education, edu, scholarships, etc.

Keep these things in mind when searching Twitter for valuable resources.

How do I search Twitter for valuable resources?

Keep in mind there are two ways to search on Twitter. Checkout this article by Joshua Odmark that explains keywords on Twitter. Essentially this article states there are two ways to search on Twitter. As a hashtag and without.

e.g. #education AND education

As you can see, one has a “#” preceding it, and one does not. Hashtag searches always contain no spaces. For example, “#EducationScholarships” as compared to “Education Scholarships”. The hashtag version of the search will return far more specific results, and thus far less results. Most of the time when I am researching education on Twitter I search for both of them and compare the results.

Stick to generalized searches on Twitter. Unfortunately Twitter has not perfected the search results just yet. They are working on it though, because they keep hiring Google employees to help them in their real-time search.

Speaking of real-time search, that is EXACTLY what Twitter is. Which means, when you perform the search is absolutely critical if it is a broad search term. For example, a search for “education” returns results minute by minute. A search for “#education” returns results hour by hour.

That means that when you perform the “education” search is critically important. Which also means that to research Twitter properly, you must perform general searches at multiple times throghout the day

I have found it best to search during peak times, such as about 8:40AM and 9:00PM.

Valuable Twitter Education Resources

Twitter

• College Matching Service
• ScholarshipsUSA
• OnlineCollegeUS
• FafsaHelp
• EducationWeek
• Education_com
• Education

Other Resources

• WeFollow.com Scholarships
• WeFollow.com Education
• Edmodo
• More Edmodo

When you make the decision to go to an online college, it’s not always easy to have a space for yourself, especially if you have a family or a small home. It may be that there’s a work area around there, but then your kids or relatives keep bugging you around and such. Here are some guidelines that will assist you on deciding how to design and set-up a home office area just for online learning!

Find some space. If possible, try to dedicate a whole room to your new library or home office. Otherwise, it may be easier just creating a dual-purpose room like a guest room and home office, or setting up a home office area within an unused portion of the house (like the attic or basement). Make sure your room has a door that closes; this will help cut down on noise and interruptions (like the people passing by behind your back). By identifying a specific area or room as your home office, it sends a clear message: “When I am in here, it is because I am studying.”

Pick a quiet location. Road traffic is noisy, so try to pick a room that does not have a window facing a main thoroughfare. The kitchen is also a hotspot for noise: clanging dishes and pans; cupboards swinging shut; the refrigerator door being opened and shut. You may not notice small or repetitive noises now, but when you are reviewing for an exam or drafting a 15-page paper, these little distractions can have a big impact on your concentration.

Electronic resources abound, and they can be of very high quality. The best way to find peer-reviewed, high-quality journal articles is to access them through your online library, or to purchase the articles through an article provider. However, there are excellent sources that are both accurate and of high quality on the Web, and they are often free and not password protected.

Whether you are looking for journal articles, monographs, factual information, or high-quality publicly available resources, the same principles apply. Narrow your topic, make sure your search terms are relevant and focused, make sure your articles and your topic are in alignment, examine your sources for bias and distortion, and finally, make sure that your online class provides sufficient support and background for your argument. Let’s expand the steps and look at them again. It is useful to look at each of the stages individually and to think about how and why you will be engaged in activities.

Create an annotated bibliography. As you download and read your articles, you can keep track of them by creating an “electronic notebook” which would consist of a citation of your sources. Create an entry for each source. Use the appropriate style (MLA, APA, CBE, Chicago, etc.). After you have completed that, be sure to write a one-sentence overview/summary of the article and how it relates to your topic.

Update your outline. Re-examine your thesis. Look at your argumentation structure. Does each paragraph and subsection help support your thesis? How does your research fit? Determine where you have gaps, redundancies, or where your sources take you on a tangent.

Fill in the gaps. Make a list of the places in your paper where you need additional support for your argument. Then, after eliminating redundancies, map where you need to fill gaps, and where your argument needs additional support.

What have others said? As you conduct preliminary research in the library, you will find books and articles on your topic. As you read the material, try to form an idea of what the major issues have been in the discussions about your topic. For example, if your topic is on how stem cells could treat Lou Gehrig’s Disease, you will need to have an idea of who the first people who started researching the topic. You will also need to identify the sides of the argument. Who is for it? Who is against it? Why? What are the issues? Once you have a sense of the main players, you can start to do searches based on author name as well as key words or topics. Ironically, in some cases, you may even have to be aware that the site may not have the original version of the information you’re citing. They may, in actuality, be borrowing from another site. This is particularly the case with Web sites and services that subscribe to Weblogs or where the information is mirrored because they have chosen to pull the entire article in the feed.

Organize your sources, articles, and notes. After you have found your articles, be sure to organize them so that you have a sense of where they will go in your online class paper. Keep your primary thesis in mind, and the points you are trying to make and will support with evidence and research findings from your articles. This is a good time to return to your outline and to start mapping out where you plan to use your sources and citations.

Keep active in your online class. Visit your course on a regular basis, just like you were going to class. Keep up on the discussion postings, turning in your papers on time, and do the readings. It will make you feel more connected if you are in the mindset of a regular student. If you’re struggling to stay focused check out Alistapart.com and Davecheong.com for some great articles. (Hint: Make sure to respond to e-mails as you would like others to respond to yours.)

Talk to others about your course. Let your friends and family know you are taking an online course and share some of the things you are learning. Sharing will not only help you feel less isolated, it will help you absorb the information and make your online work more exciting. (Hint: Don’t bore people with your knowledge, just share a little about what it’s like for you.)

Use the course chat room or instant messaging. If it’s available, get to know your fellow students in the class chat room or through instant messaging. Ask your buddy to meet you at a certain time and use that time to informally discuss the class. Invite others into the conversation by sending an invitation to all your classmates – some may come and some may not. Your professor may notice and admire your commitment to the course which could translate into a better grade. If you have a team assignment, pick the chat room or instant messaging for one of your meetings. (Hint: Some chat rooms have a record feature and your professor and all your classmates can read the transcript, so keep your comments positive!)

In a traditional classroom, you meet your fellow students and faculty and create a real community; even it’s only for the length of the class. You notice when your classmates look upset or even who is there and who is absent. That’s part of the community; it makes you feel connected, and it is one of the more enjoyable aspects of college life. But can you get that feeling as an online student? The answer is yes and here’s how!

Share a little personal information. It can be about your family (Are you married? Do you have children? Any pets?) and your life (Think favorite hobbies, professional interests, top five movies, etc.) in either your bio page or the introduction post. If you are able to post a photo, do so. (Hint: Most course management systems reside behind a firewall so only your classmates, your professor and some of the administrators have access to this information and they are required by law to not share personal information, so it’s a safe environment.)

Remember that your other classmates are in the same situation. You are not the only one who feels some sense of isolation. Just like in a classroom, some people are shy and some are outgoing. It just takes one person to do a little reaching out to create a community and you can be that person. (Hint: Even if you are a little shy, you don’t have to speak to get a community started online.)

Find a buddy. In the beginning of the online class, find someone you’d like to get to know better and start up an email conversation with them. It’s good to have a buddy in the class and it will help reduce your isolation. Keep your initial e-mail short and let the receiver know in the Subject line that you are from the same class. (Hint: If one person does not respond, find another person to e-mail.

Chatting during an online class may be a breeze, but it can even be a lot easier if you do these measures:
Be on time. Just be on time for your chat. In fact, be a little early so you can get the feel of the chat room. If you are going to be late, make sure you let your professor know ahead of time or see if you can reschedule. When you come to a chat late, it’s like coming to a class late, everyone, including the professor, notices. (Hint: Most class chats are recorded, so the professor has the exact time you entered the chat in the transcript!)

Have your references on hand. Make sure you have your paper, your textbooks, and any other documentation readily available, so you can refer to it to support your ideas or you can check your interpretation with the other students in the chat room. (Hint: If you want to reference something specific in a reading you know the whole chat room is using — like the textbook, just refer to the page; don’t type the whole thing in.)

Avoid disruptions during the chat. A chat room where the professor asks a student a question and gets no response, especially if the student has been responding quickly, indicates the student isn’t there. It gets uncomfortable for everyone, so make sure your chat has your full attention. If given the option, select a chat time where you know you will not be interrupted, avoid the temptation to check your e-mail or you’re my space page while in the chat room, and keep focused. (Hint: If the chat is just not moving fast enough for you, make notes on a sheet of paper about the ideas you are having during the chat.)

Expect the unexpected. Even with the best of technology, something can go wrong. You could lose power, others could lose power, the website could go down, you might have to miss because of something unexpected at the last minute, etc. If something happens, don’t panic. E-mail your professor as soon as possible. Be open and honest and ask how you can make up for your absence. (Hint: If the professor lets you copy the transcript and interject your comments — don’t destroy the flavor of the chat by over stating your position because you have time. Just write your comments and ideas exactly as if you had stayed in the chat. No one likes a show-off.)

Know the chat room signs and symbols. Some online schools, to facilitate a civil conversation, give certain signs and symbols special meanings. For example an ellipses (…) sometimes is put at the end of a sentence to mean there is more to come. Find out what the recommended signs and symbols are before the chat starts. You can learn the basic signs at Netlingo.com, Thinkquest.org, and Safesurfingkids.com. (Hint: If you don’t know the signs and symbols and you type in the middle of someone else’s thoughts, you will be seen as rude!)

Be patient. Some people are very slow typists and others have dial up issues. Sometimes it takes a long time for a thought to get out, so be patient. Let your professor be the gatekeeper for the discussion. (Hint: If the chat is going really slowly, review your topic notes or have baroque music playing in the background to keep your mind active and focused.)

Read what your professor has to say. In the beginning of each chat, most professors will go over the rules; let you know the order of the chat, the time limit for the chat, what’s acceptable in the chat, etc. Pay attention to these comments. The chat room is a time where the professor sees you interact with others in real time. You want to make a good impression. One of the elements of grading a chat room is almost always about following directions. (Hint: A professor may not state the element of following directions, but it will affect the subjective part of your grade.)