Help your child get inventive with these resources

Do you have students who love inventing, experimenting, and computing? Then check out my article on Answers.com which features quality, free or inexpensive places you can turn to help your students discover, explore, and develop his or her inner inventor. 

Visit "Help your child get inventive with these resources" to find out about more about resources like Super Awesome Sylvia, Tynker, and Makey Makey.  

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Preparing students for real-world financial success

Students often begin pursuing employment as early as high school, but they are not taught best practices when it comes to managing their money. Everyone should know how to make healthy financial decisions, yet it is rarely found in the high school curriculum. While the new Common Core Standards stress the importance of career readiness, it’s not clear in what context students would learn strategies for real world financial concerns--like staying out of debt and the benefits of having good credit.

Whether or not we are teaching this, students are watching it. It is not unusual for a young person to witness from their own family how smart choices can lead to a comfortable lifestyle or how one mistake with your personal finances can take years to erase. Knowing which is which can indeed lead to not only career, but also life, success. Despite the obvious necessity of this, it seems as though it is kept as some sort of secret, or in some cases, it is almost a shameful topic. The result is that in many cases neither families nor schools are helping students understand the importance of building credit, planning for the future or knowing how to think about life after work, how to save, or knowing when to take social security benefits.

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5 reasons less is more when it comes to STEM

This post was original featured on Smartblogs on Education in Inspiring Others, Public Policy

Schools are missing the boat when it comes to addressing the problem of preparing students to recapture America’s leadership in producing scientists, inventors, engineers, programmers and more through STEM initiatives. The answer has little to do with more teachers, more common graduation requirements, more tests or more school as our policymakers and corporations who stand to profit off this have suggested.

Instead, if we listen to what the experts in these fields are telling us we discover that when it comes to producing successful STEM graduates, the key lies in the adage “less is more.”

Five lessons from STEM experts

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Family Learns Together Through App Creation

Guest post by Kevin Scritchfield

My family’s dream of creating apps for the App Store began over 3 years ago when our kids were involved in the National Bible Bee when it first began. The Bible Bee organization would send you all of the materials - mainly specific verses on different sized cards - for you to study and memorize in preparation for the local competition in order to work your way up to the National stage. My son had the idea of creating a specific type of memorization app that would have helped in the process of memorizing the hundreds of required verses. That conversation grew into talking about other apps that we might be able to create and how we could go about doing that.

Even though my son was only 13 at the time, he had already gone through (at home) a couple of the courses that I teach at my school called Web Page Design (where he learned HTML - the programming language that is at least the shell for all web pages) and Introduction to Computer Programming in C (the programming language than many other languages are based on). He had also played around with the iPhone SDK which is what Apple provides to app developers to create iPhone apps in, as well as Corona SDK which is a third party application that is very similar to Apple’s. With all of this knowledge under his belt, we thought he would be able to create the code for these apps that we had been thinking of  developing. We thought we would start with the one that we pictured doing the best in terms of potential sales within the App Store and to the widest possible potential audience. So our goal was to become an app-developing family!
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Should the new math be financial literacy?

Regardless of which side you fall on when it comes to the math wars, most will agree that many students leave high school, and even college, unprepared to handle their own finances. Some would agree that we have become distracted with the potential ability of math to predict future academic success or support critical thinking? In the meantime, we have lost focus on preparing young people for what will matter in their real lives. If the education system were to provide some financial literacy classes for kids, it could make a tremendous difference in the economic success of society.

Why it Would Help
If the educational system provided financial literacy classes, it could change the way that people operate later in life. People would be know how to save money, how to invest, and how to avoid debt. If more people were able to hold onto their money, society would be much wealthier overall, which would lead to fewer problems.

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