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How to Use Tech to Help With Homeschooling

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There are many reasons you may have to homeschool a child, whether for a short period of time or for a long while. Perhaps you don’t live in an area where you have easy access to a school, or maybe your child has a chronic illness and can’t attend a public school. The COVID-19 pandemic has even required some parents to homeschool their children for a short period of time. If you’re in this situation, here are a few ways you can use tech to boost it.

Create Virtual Deadlines

Technology is great for creating deadlines, which is something you might want to use for homeschooling. For example, you can use an online service to set up deadlines for English papers or homework assignments, which your child can check in on and mark as “complete” when they’re finished with it. These virtual deadlines allow you to determine how your child’s handling certain deadlines or even the concept of deadlines in general.

Allow Your Child to Develop Interests

One thing that public schooling tends to hamper in children is their creativity. When you’re trying to create a curriculum that will work for dozens of children, who will cycle out every year, you’re going to have to ignore most of the unique characteristics of these children. That leads to many children not developing a love for any subject because it’s not tailored to them. A benefit of homeschooling is that you can encourage your child toward the fields they love, and the internet opens them up to many new fields.

Utilize Resources Other Parents Have Created

You’re not the only person who’s homeschooling your child. There are plenty of other parents out there who have also made the decision to homeschool for whatever reason. Those parents have then come up with their own tips, tricks, curriculum, and resources that you can utilize to help with your own homeschooling journey. It’s easier to come up with your own plan when you can create it by pulling from other people’s preexisting plans, which you can often find online.

Don’t Try to Recreate a School Perfectly

Some parents worry that if they’re unable to recreate the feeling of public school perfectly in their homeschooling endeavors, they’ll end up failing their child. The fact is, you don’t have to make sure your children are sitting down for eight hours every weekday to teach them valuable and important information. If you choose to utilize math games on your tablet, visit your local science center’s online learning portal, and assign the newest YA novel instead of classic literature, that’s fine.

Reach Out for Expert Resources

External schooling resources can be extremely helpful if you’re trying to help your child learn. Every child needs different information to succeed, and the experts out there will help your child get the information they need. Plus, livestreaming courses like those at OneClass will help you utilize tech to teach your kids what they need to know.

You don’t have to be an expert in everything to homeschool your child. You just need to be willing to take information from anywhere it comes from, whether that’s an online streaming service or a paper textbook. Utilize tech in your day-to-day teaching lifestyle to make homeschooling easier on yourself and your children.

3 Ways to Reduce the Cost of Sending Your Kid to College

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The day that your son or daughter is accepted to the university of their dreams is a proud day for you as a parent. Unfortunately, though, it is also the start of the stressful process of trying to find the funding required to send your kid to college. From rising tuition costs to room and board, there are so many things that contribute to the overall cost of attending a four-year university these days.

While at first glance, you might be wondering how you are going to afford to help your child earn their college degree, there are certainly plenty of options out there that can help reduce these costs. Here are three ways that you might be able to cut down the expenses associated with college.

1. Scholarships

Scholarships are probably the most popular route to take when it comes to finding funding for further education. There are a lot of different scholarships out there that range in the amount you can receive to cover part of your college funding or even the full cost of tuition. The key is to find the right scholarships for the university your child hopes to attend, and then apply to as many as possible.

For instance, if your child wishes to go to college in Ohio, you need to find scholarships in Ohio specifically. You can visit CampusReel to find out more about this. Some federal scholarships might be applicable to universities all over the country, while others will only be available for use locally. No matter which scholarships your child wants to apply for, make sure that they start applying early so that they can increase their chances of receiving as much additional funding as possible.

2. Shop Around

Some students dream of attending a particular university and are not willing to compromise that dream. While there is nothing wrong with this concept in general, it is important to highlight to your child that some universities are far more affordable than others.

Take into account the difference between attending college in your home state instead of going out of state. There is a significant difference between in-state tuition and out-of-state tuition. If your child is willing to attend a university closer to home, then you could stand to save a significant amount if they continue to live at home.

Furthermore, the cost of attending a private university is far greater than that of a state school. While private schools can be more prestigious, an education from a state university can be just as valuable for a fraction of the cost.

3. Start Small

While attending a four-year university is the goal of most students, you and your child might consider the option of taking a year or two at a community college first and then transferring to a major university. There are core classes that all college students must complete in the pursuit of a degree. Often, these classes can be taken at a community college for a considerably lower cost compared to the tuition at a large university, and then those credits can transfer over to a university.

Here’s Why You Should Consider Catholic Education for Your Child

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Your kids are finally approaching the age where it’s time to send them to school.

You thought of sending your little ones to the local public school but are wary.

You’ve considered homeschooling them, but there aren’t any local co-ops nearby.

So, you turn to private schools. There may be many, or few options nearby, but your biggest concern is what the possible benefits of Catholic education are.

Whether you’ve received a Catholic education or not, you are certainly wondering why Catholic schools are better than your other options.

Read on to learn why.

Benefits of Catholic Education

An important note: you do not have to be Catholic to attend or send your children to a Catholic school. This leads to the first major reason for considering Catholic education.

A Culture of Service and Respect

There is an important culture of and communal understanding of other persons, from all parts of this world which is integral to Catholic faith and education.

ALL of us are God’s children, and a Catholic education emphasizes as such.

With this in mind, consider how Catholic education, versus a public school education, encourages such respect.

This same community that teaches respect does so through more than policy but through direct acts of service.

The culture and community of respect grow from families, educators, and religious working together–directly forming children into generous persons.

Discipline and Excellence

Catholic education emphasizes academic rigor. Students are taught discipline as part of the faith, which leads to high expectations in scholastic achievement.

Students are seen as good, not simply because they follow rules, but because they were made as such. The discipline taught in Catholic schools stems from the recognition of the inner goodness of all people and then helping students behave accordingly.

Excellence naturally follows, with emphasis on both moral and academic discipline. This often leads to a clear path to college. In fact, the majority of Catholic high school graduates attend college.

An Enlightened Worldview

Through the high expectations of behavior and academic performance, the discipline instilled to achieve them, and the strong, healthy relationships, Catholic school education shows students how their goodness is part of the world.

This results in an emphasis on the arts and humanities less common in public school education–which tends to focus on results, over the quality of independent performance.

In essence, these students learn to see true goodness, in the Catholic, classical sense of goodness, in everyone and everything around them. These are the benefits of a Catholic education from Notre Dame Academy.

Is Catholic School Worth It?

The benefits of Catholic education listed above should be evidence enough, but one last concrete note to consider: on average, Catholic schools are far less costly than other private education.

You’re also investing in more than your child’s academic future, but that of their entire well-being when you choose Catholic education.

Furthermore, the majority of Catholic schools also include financial aid, in light of the necessity of Catholic education.

When you determine the worth of your child’s future, don’t stop at whether they’re academically equipped for this world, but if they’re ready for the emotional and spiritual demands, too.

5 Ways to Make Education in College More Fun

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5 Ways to Make Education in College More Fun

Students must have fun while learning in college. It will make them have more interest in school work. It will increase their creativity and productivity. If you work in a college and you notice that your college lacks fun activities for students, it means you have some roles to play – the role of incorporating fun into education for the benefit of students.

There are many ways through which a college can bring fun into education. Different methods have different levels of fun and benefits. We’ve compiled a list with the top five ways of making education more fun in college. 123TermPapers prepared this list for you:

1. Promote Teamwork among Students

Research reveals that teamwork among students promotes quicker and longer retention of information. It develops their ability to think critically and sharpens their communication skills. Working together creates a fun environment for students. Teachers in colleges can promote teamwork by grouping students for projects. In the course of completing projects together, students will learn new things, develop their social skills, and catch great fun.

2. Give Brain Breaks

Brain breaks are short activities that give students a break from schoolwork. They last just about 2 minutes but do a great job on students’ brains. When school work becomes too long, students become tired and lose attention. At such times, they need something to reset their mind and refocus their attention. Brain breaks are perfect for this purpose.

3. Go on Field Trip

Students love adventurous things. They catch fun, experiencing new things. Field trip gives students new experiences. It presents real-world versions of knowledge to them. It awakens their interest in learning. During a field trip, the kind of excitement that flows in students can’t be compared to the one in the classroom. In school, students sit in the same place for hours. But on trips, they walk around and exercise their body. For these reasons, teachers need to find an opportunity to take students out for trips.

4. Integrate Technology into Lesson

The integration of technology into learning is advantageous to teachers and students. It makes teaching easy, fast, and effective. It arouses the interest of students towards their studies. Technology has many ways through which it makes education interesting. One of such is gamified learning, which presents learning in the form of a game. Another one is the digital field trip, where students can go on a virtual field trip. With technology, teachers can organize lessons into presentation and multimedia files which students will love.

5. Make Teachings Practical

Practical classes make students appreciate the education. It reveals to them how school lessons relate to life. There are plenty of lessons which students can turn into practical. Lessons such as drawing, crafting, designing and construction of things. All these can come as a project which students get the reward for. Students will catch fun in completing projects. They’ll develop their skills and become more creative.

Conclusion

Fun reduces stress levels and increases curiosity level. Its importance in education can’t be overemphasized. Students won’t stay productive for too long without fun. But with fun, their productivity is limitless.

Top Salesforce certifications to better your career

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When you think of connecting your company directly to your customer, Salesforce CRM is the first thing that should come to your mind. Salesforce is a customer relationship management software that brings companies and customers together. As it is created with the intent of reinventing customer relationship management, Salesforce is the world’s number 1 CRM platform today.

There are more than 1.5 lacs of companies that rely on Salesforce to drive better results for sales productivity, sales win rates, marketing, and revenue growth and services quality. Salesforce is a registered Software as a Service(SaaS) CRM company. Salesforce.com is a multi-tenant architecture. This implies that multiple customers work on common technology and on the latest updates. The updates happen automatically. With Salesforce, you can focus on innovation rather than technology.

This article gives you a complete overview of the Salesforce features and top Salesforce certifications that can benefit your career.

Features of Salesforce

The top features of Salesforce are :

Customer-first approach:

The first priority of this platform is the customer. It lets you treat your customers as if they are your only customer. Salesforce makes it easier to determine the customer’s choices and requirements and solve their issues to upsell your services.

CRM innovation:

There are some innovative developments like Artificial Intelligence, in-built customization tools, more than 4k pre-integrated apps on AppExchange and data-driven insights and analytics.

Negligible maintenance:

With the entire range of Salesforce products running on the cloud, it minimizes the maintenance cost of otherwise setting up expensive infrastructure.

Mobile-first CRM:

With everything being on the cloud, you don’t need to worry about the device you are using. Businesses get the facility of working using any device connected to the internet (laptop or smartphone) with Salesforce CRM.

Great customer support:

You can manage and analyze all customer activities with the help of Salesforce CRM.  This helps you monitor the jobs and responsibilities of all departments, from sales to customer support, raising tickets for completion of work, and channel marketing to website analytics. It helps you in providing quality service to your customers.

Greater sales:

Salesforce CRM can increase your sales productivity by 38%, as it can help you sell faster and smarter. With its lightning platform, you can work with enhanced efficiency and growth.

Types of Salesforce Certification

Salesforce certifications are targeted at the Administrator level and Developer level.

Salesforce offers two levels of Administrator credentials. These are:

  • Salesforce Certified Administrator: In this certification, a candidate’s knowledge of customizing Salesforce, managing users, configuring the platform, and using Salesforce features to the fullest is verified.
  • Salesforce Certified Advanced Administrator: This certification is best suited for experienced professionals. In addition to verifying a candidate’s proficiency in dashboards, designing advanced reports, and automation processes, this certification also tests skills in using advanced administration capabilities using Salesforce.

At the developer level, Salesforce offers three categories of certification.

  • Salesforce Certified Commerce Cloud Developer: Candidates are expected to have hands-on experience of using the Commerce Cloud Digital Platform so that they can develop an e-commerce solution.
  • Salesforce Certified Platform Developer I: This is apt for experienced professionals and makes sure that an individual is skilled in designing custom declarative and programmatic applications on the Force.com platform.
  • Salesforce Certified Platform Developer II: This certification validates a candidate’s advanced knowledge of data modeling and the coding capabilities of the Force.com platform.

Top 5 Salesforce Certifications to Pursue

Salesforce is best known for its intelligent Customer Success Platform, which provides cloud solutions for sales, communities, services, analytics, marketing, platform, apps, the Internet of Things(IoT) and Artificial Intelligence.

Most Salesforce Certifications can be acquired by qualifying a 60-questions, multiple-choice exam. The duration of these exams varies from 90 to 120 minutes depending on the certification. Top 5 Salesforce certifications that one can pursue to upgrade their career are:

  • Salesforce Administrator Certification

This Certification is designed to ensure that you achieve expertise in the concepts of Salesforce Administrator. Here you learn how to configure and administer Sales and Service Clouds, understand the sales and marketing ecosystem, and utilize Salesforce features to the fullest to derive a lot out of them.

To become certified you should complete the training course and visit certification.Salesforce.com to register to take the ADM201 exam and pass it.

  • Salesforce Platform App Builder Certification

This is designed for candidates who would like to demonstrate their skills in designing, building and deploying custom applications using the declarative customization capabilities of the Lightning platform.  The candidates have knowledge of creating, managing, and update data models, application security, business logic, and process automation.

You can qualify for this exam by scoring a minimum of 63% marks and duration being 105minutes.

  • Salesforce Platform Developer I

This Certification is designed to make you dexterous in developing business logic and customizing applications programmatically using Apex code and Visualforce UI framework on the Force.com platform. It prepares you for Dev450 certification. The learning objectives include cloud computing concepts, PaaS, SaaS, IaaS- Service model, Public, Private, Community, and hybrid cloud models.

  • Salesforce Certified Service Cloud Consultant

This is designed for consultants who have experience in implementing Salesforce Service Cloud Solutions in a customer-facing role. The professionals are experienced in administration and configuring a Salesforce application. This certification demonstrates that a candidate can successfully design and implement Service Cloud Solutions that meet customer business requirements, are maintainable and scalable, and contribute to long term customer success.

  • Salesforce Sales Cloud Consultant Certification

With this certification, you learn the industry knowledge, implementation strategies, sales cloud, solution design, marketing, and leads account and contact management, opportunity management, sales productivity, communities and site management, sales cloud analytics, integration and data management.

Salesforce has become the latest trend these days and if you wish to get an exponential salary hike then you certainly need to qualify any of the Salesforce certifications. To qualify these certifications, taking a training course will certainly help you. An online course is designed to equip you with the skills to answer the questions, apply knowledge and demonstrate Salesforce administration competencies, describe the standard object architecture, and much more. So add this credential to your resume today and witness the desired growth in your career.

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