This post is being written while listening to Professor Jim Newton’s Communication Studies 187: Journalistic Ethics from the University of California Los Angeles for free. The lecture is an hour-long video clip from YouTube. The U.S. News and World Report states that many college professors are uploading their lectures to online sites, extending higher education past students and teachers to all people. Their lectures are publicly available to anyone interested. ...Read More About Free Online College Lectures

When will I ever need this? Why would I ever need to know this? Questions like this from students are often met with an answer like, Well, when you're in the real world... Wrong answer. This represents the loss of a great learning opportunity. Instead of referencing some ambiguous state called the real world, educators could instead find applications with which the students can directly relate. Merely just saying that they will need this specific piece of knowledge in some future "real world" also unnecessarily devalues the student's current lives. Are they not living very real moments every day? So how can educators ...Read More About In The Real World

Think back on your own schooling, and you'll realize that many classroom environments are meant to stifle failures. If you're currently a student, you well know the embarrassment that comes if you raise your hand and offer an incorrect answer. Students become boxed in, afraid to stretch their thinking beyond the confines that teachers have established. However, research, and anecdotal evidence, is showing that accepting failures as part of the learning process can lead to more creative individuals who are able to apply problem solving skills to new problems. The December issue of WIRED magazine has a nice article d ...Read More About Failing Is An Option

The next SAT test date is only a month away! 1. Practice, practice, practice. Just like learning how to ride a bike, you get better at the SAT by practicing. Staring at the questions won't get you far. Dive in and do some practice questions. You'll not only learn the format of the questions, you'll also learn how The College Board (makers of the SAT) likes to word questions. 2. Use The Official SAT Study Guide. What better way to practice than by using actual SAT test questions? This book is published by The College Board, and contains a whopping 10 full length practice tests. In addition, the ...Read More About Five SAT Test Prep Tips

A New York Times article has reported that SRI International for the Department of Education discovered that students performed better in online learning scenarios than in classroom scenarios. The study was performed from 1996 through 2008, and it used mostly college students and adults. However, some K-12 students were used. Students who did some or all of their work in online settings ranked nine percent higher on test scores than students who used strictly classroom, face-to-face instructions. On average, students who used online instructions ranked in the 59th percentile on test scores, while students who used only classroom instructions ...Read More About Online Education