Category: Education

Visual content has grown increasingly significant in all aspects of human life in the contemporary era. Because 65 percent of individuals learn best through visuals, they are vital for eLearning courses. By diving into important statistics and facts, this will investigate why students prefer visual learning when studying.

Memory For Visuals Tends To Be Quite Robust

Associating ideas with concrete visuals is a simple but effective strategy for helping students remember what they’ve learned. Students are more likely to retain information presented visually because they are able to make more sense of it and focus more intently on it. Studies have shown that after three days, people only remember 10% to 20% of what they read or hear, but they recall over 65% of what they see.

Visuals Are Far More Efficient At Conveying Meaning Than Words

Having the data laid out in bullet points makes them much easier to read and absorb. The same data, presented as a picture or video, is processed much more rapidly. Our eyes can detect 36,000 visual signals every hour, while the brain can process pictures lasting just 13 milliseconds, as reported by Visual Teaching Alliance. Within a tenth of a second, our brains can process enough visual information to form an overall impression of a situation. Images can be processed 60,000 times faster than words by the human brain.  Since visual learning is so important to them, osmosis is one of the best online learning platform for medicine currently available.

Stimulates Students’ Curiosity

Have you ever noticed how much more engaging a lecture gets when the speaker incorporates a humorous image onto the board? Text-only classroom lectures might be dull for some students. Studying using visuals can be a lot of fun and a really intriguing experience. Including images in your notes is one way to make even the most boring lectures more interesting. Using visual aids such as pictures, colors, and sketches helps learners stay interested and concentrated.

Improve Your Capacity For Higher-Level Reasoning

When dealing with complex or text-heavy subjects, visual aids like diagrams and infographics can be invaluable. Including images in notes helps us retain information because it engages our imagination. In addition, when we put our minds to the task of translating words into pictures, we exercise our higher-order cognitive processes.

Visuals Can Facilitate Faster Learning

According to research, seeing something helps our brain digest it more quickly than reading words. It’s easier and quicker to absorb data presented in visual formats like flowcharts, graphs, symbols, etc. Having something to look at may help us remember and understand concepts more thoroughly. Visuals like pictures are kept in our long-term memory, although our short-term memory can only hold a tiny amount of information. Words are difficult to recall because they are abstract and complicated, and our brains are wired to prefer pictures. Consider how quickly your mind can conjure up a logo for any brand, even before you can remember the name of the brand itself.

The Bottom Line

A visual system is a powerful tool for education. Most individuals can recall any information presented to them in a visual style. Do you learn best by reading about something, or would you rather have it demonstrated in an image or video? Since pictures are more appealing than written information, most individuals would choose the latter option.

The Ultimate Guide to Easily Make Instructional Videos

Almost all students have a least one subject that they consider to be their least favorite. While this subject will vary from student to student, the one that most kids tend to hate is math. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Math is one of the more difficult subjects early on in school, and it doesn’t really get easier.

However, the difficulty isn’t the only reason students struggle with math, in particular. There are usually other explanations as to why this is. In this article, we will go over those reasons so that you can better adapt your teaching strategy to account for them.

Learning Disabilities

One thing that many schools have become much better about these days is acknowledging any learning disabilities a student might have and making adjustments for them. Things such as autism or ADD/ADHD are well-known problems that can make learning math more difficult for some students, but dyslexia is another one.

Most of the time, dyslexia makes reading more difficult for children, but it can also happen with numbers. In fact, some students might only have dyslexia with numerical values and not letters, making it harder to detect. Regardless of what learning disabilities, your students may face, changing the way you teach to accommodate them is crucial for their success.

Lack of Patience or Concentration

Not all mental struggles come from learning disabilities, though. Many young children struggle with common concepts such as patience and concentration. Kids can work on and develop these traits as they get older, but in the meantime, they will struggle with their math studies if they lack either of them.

That means, on top of finding new ways to help your students master math, you should also figure out how to help them improve these traits. Not every day needs to be a math lesson. Taking the time to help students develop their patience and concentration will go a long way.

Left-Brain vs. Right-Brain

Of course, one of the more well-known reasons why some students struggle with math is because they are right-brained people. Those who use more right-brained thinking are those who are creative and expressive. Math is very straight to the point and analytical, something that comes more naturally to left-brained individuals.

In order to combat this, you should try to find ways to inject creativity into your lessons. Maybe you design a project around a complex topic or come up with problems that are more stimulating to right-brained people. The choice is up to you.

Math Anxiety

Finally, we have math anxiety. Sometimes, the thought of having to do math will stress kids, teens, and even adults out and cause them to struggle even more than before. This problem can be made worse by all of the previously mentioned difficulties. It can also be hard to identify, but once you know how to recognize and overcome math anxiety, you will be able to help a lot of students do much better with this troublesome subject.

If you are looking to introduce your children to the world of books, there are few ages sooner to do so than when they are still in kindergarten. Even if you know that you want to start your kids on books, you may be confounded about which books are best for them.

To that end, we have provided several examples of a kindergarten read aloud lesson plan that accounts for length, wordiness, and their ability to grab kids’ attention.

“Mae Among the Stars” by Roda Ahmed

This is the story of a girl named Mae. Mae dreams about dancing around high up in outer space, surrounded by glimmering stars as she moves about the cosmos and learns more and more about it. She soon realizes that she wants to be an astronaut when she grows up. Upon hearing the aspirations of young Mae, her mother encourages her by saying it could happen if she truly believed it will and she works hard to achieve it. Mae’s willingness to learn, dedication, and intellect plus her parents’ encouragement help the young girl rise through education, join NASA, and eventually earn the unique claim of being the first African-American astronaut.

“Leo: A Ghost Story” by Mac Barnett

Leo is a quirky little boy who enjoys drawing pictures and making snacks. Leo also happens to be a ghost, which makes it impossible for most people to ever notice him. After a new family moves into his home and his few gestures as welcoming the new tenants are all grossly misunderstood, Leo considers moving on to see the rest of what the world can offer. It is during this moment of crisis that Leo meets the super-imaginative Jane. Jane can somehow see Leo and wants him to serve her as a knight. The two strike up a friendship that serves as the start of a true adventure.

“The Day The Crayons Quit” by Drew Daywalt

Duncan is a little boy who is in the mood to do some coloring. Unfortunately, the moment he opens his crayon box he only finds several letters with the same message. Each of his crayons is fed up and has decided to quit being used for coloring. The blue crayon is worn out from being used to color water, the black crayon feels underused since Duncan only uses it for drawing outlines and the yellow and orange crayons are feuding because each believes its color to be the true color of the sun. This book illustrates what a person can do to ease tensions between different individuals and restore their interest in what they are best suited for.

“Waiting Is Not Easy” by Mo Willems

This exemplary book for introducing kindergarteners to books is the perfect choice for any little one that has trouble sitting still. The book is just bombastic, humorous, and easily legible enough to keep the little ones invested in a story about dealing with friendship and properly exercising patience and extolling the merits of doing so. Furthermore, the story is appealing enough that most kids will appreciate rereading it or having it read to them on multiple occasions.

“Friends Stick Together” by Hannah Harrison

Rupert is a kind, upstanding rhino. Levi is a rambunctious, uncouth tickbird. Rupert grows frustrated with Levi’s coarse behavior and antics in school and his frustration only grows upon learning that Levi plans to make himself the best friend to Rupert. The one thing Rupert wants to happen is for Levi to go away. Soon, Levi finally leaves Rupert alone but the rhino soon feels like things have gotten considerably more dull and boring without the brusque bird to keep classes lively. This is a great story for encouraging children to value and respect other kids with wildly different behaviors.

The Last Page

Well, that covers a handful of choice selections to start stocking your kindergartener’s library shelves with. Each of these books is an ideal piece of youth literature because the text is simple and large enough to process.  Both the stories and their illustrations are wild and entertaining enough to keep children invested without overwhelming them. After exposing your kids to one of these stories, they will love them enough to give you time to get more to read.

Educational Books for Kids | How to Choose the Right Ones for Early Learning

Teachers are underpaid — a fact that many of them face when they set out into this career. The lack of funding and value placed on their profession are the glaring reasons why educators continue to grapple with the measly pay they get every year.

But even if they are not properly compensated for the work that they do, many teachers still choose to stay in their field simply because they love teaching. This passion and dedication are also what drive them to be creative to make more money and save it for a rainy day.

If you’re a teacher who wants to alleviate the financial burden that comes with this profession, consider these seven ways to do just that.

Online or In-person Tutoring

The simplest way for teachers to make extra money is to tutor. It would be easy for educators to venture into one-on-one tutoring since it involves the same skill set you use for classroom teaching. The only difference is that tutoring focuses on one student and doesn’t follow a strict curriculum.

Tutoring is also less demanding since you only have to meet an hourly minimum and allows you to work whenever you can, especially when it comes to online teaching jobs.  What’s more, this side job can help you improve your teaching skills based on the experiences and interactions that you will encounter.

Write a Reference Material Online

Want to share your knowledge about a subject you’re teaching with other educators or students? Write a book about it! Specifically, an eBook or a publication made in digital form.

This sideline allows you to hit two birds with one stone: helping other people learn while increasing your income. The greatest advantage of writing an education or reference material in eBook form is that you don’t have to worry about finding a publicist for it.

There are a variety of online platforms that allow you to upload and sell your work on your own and at the price you want, with some deductions going to the platform.

The difficult part of this venture is the writing process, which could take weeks or months to finish, and the marketing phase. Still, releasing reference material online is a good way to make passive income since the reference eBook will likely sell itself once more people come across it.

Be A Freelancer

Like tutoring, freelancing also offers the benefit of having a second source of income and allowing you to work whenever you can. The difference is that being a freelancer lets you do other things aside from teaching.

If you’re good at writing, then you can take up the side hustle of producing articles and blogs. Your video and photo editing abilities could also come in handy in this field since a lot of companies and individuals are looking for creatives that have these skills.

Turning your creative hobbies into side jobs allows you to improve your non-teaching craft while also helping you generate additional income.

Teach Summer School

If you don’t have any summer plans lined up and want to pull in some extra revenue, consider signing up to teach in summer school. The pay depends on your location; some might pay more than the normal rate, while others might give just the same as a normal school day.

The great thing about teaching in summer school is that it only lasts for a few hours and the classes are usually smaller. It also presents the opportunity for creative teaching, wherein educators can diverge away from the curriculum and teach the material however they see fit.

Use Teacher Discounts

Take advantage of discounts given to teachers during the back-to-school season and the World Teachers’ Day celebration. Retailers usually offer markdowns during these times, especially for school supplies.

Some shops even give year-round discounts for educators. Search for these markdown sales online and cross-reference them with their original prices and other stores to make sure you’re getting the best deals.

Organize School Fundraisers or Donation Drives

Fundraisers and donation drives can supplement the school’s budget for extracurricular programs, supplies, and even facility upgrades. With this financial addendum, you won’t have to use a significant amount of your earnings for school-related expenses, resulting in your ability to save money for yourself.

While it seems difficult, teachers meet a lot of people through their profession, thereby connecting them to potential supporters within their communities. These people — students, parents, and other teachers — will be more than willing to help out when you reach out to them through a fundraising or donation drive.

Track Your Expenses

Another practical way to save money is to stay on top of your expenses. Doing so will help you review your spending habits and determine where you can cut back. Keeping track of your expenses also makes it easy to apply for reimbursement or tax deductions wherever they are applicable.  You can use this free tax calculator to get a better idea on how certain deductions will impact your overall tax return.

Final Thoughts

The fulfillment that comes with teaching isn’t always enough to supplement the low pay that educators receive every year. That’s why many teachers turn to part-time jobs to compensate for that insufficient income. With that said, consider the opportunities listed above to make extra money for their personal and teaching needs.