Saturday, September 29, 2012

Helping our Children's Education

Listen to them and pay attention to their problems.
Children need to know that you, as a parent are concerned about their problems and are always ready to listen to them. If kids don’t know their concerns and feelings have value, they will be less likely to share them with their parents.
Read with them.If children see their parents taking an active interest in reading with them, they are much more likely to continue reading on their own. It is one of the best things a parent can do to help younger children build a solid base for the rest of their school years.
Tell family stories.Not only are family stories a great way to expose your child to public speaking, but they create a sense of connection and family that ads stability to a young persons view of life. Your children are much more likely to retain a story that involves a family member and then be able to re-tell the tale to others.
Limit their television watching.Television is considered by some to be a major obstacle to education for children today. As elaborated on at www.tvkids.us [http://www.tvkids.us] , Kids spend more time watching television than any other single activity other than sleeping and school. Limiting the time spent watching television important, but controlling the content is equally important. It is a parent’s responsibility to ensure their children’s brains are not fed with junk. There are some quality children’s television shows that are educational and fun for the kids too.
Have books and other reading materials in the house.This is a no brainer. There is really no reason not to have books around the house for children. Children’s books are readily available and are not expensive. You can pick up second hand books at garage sales and flea markets and popular online auction sites for very little money.
Look up words in the dictionary with them.Challenge your kids to listen for words they are not familiar with and look it up. Try a new word every day. This is a good exercise for adults too!
Encourage them to use an encyclopedia.If you don’t have access to an encyclopedia, use the internet. There is vast wealth of knowledge on the internet, just waiting to be explored. www.encyclopedia.com is a great free resource to start with.
Share favorite poems and songs with them.After you have shared your songs, ask them to share theirs. There are a ton of song lyrics available online. Look some of you kids favorites up, print them off and get them to practice reading them back to before singing them.
Take them to the library--get them their own library cards.The first time my kids went to a library, the absolutely loved it. With all the information available at home these days I tend to forget how cool libraries were when I was a kid. Kids still love to see all the books, and when they get their own library cards and understand how the library works, it teaches them responsibility.
Take them to museums and historical sites, when possible.Take the time to do this one, especially the museums. It is an experience they won’t forget. It opens up children’s minds and really gets them excited about learning. It’s really fun for parents too!
Discuss the daily news with them.The news is not always good, so focus your conversations towards interesting topics and skip over the stuff that they are to young to concern themselves with. Local newspapers are usually a good source for community events and milder topics.
Go exploring with them and learn about plants, animals, andlocal geography.Take along a plant guidebook and search for the different species of flowers or have the children write down the names of the animals they see. The key is to keep them involved and interested. Bring along a camera and when you get back, print off the pictures and have the kids make a scrapbook of the things they saw that day.
Find a quiet place for them to study.Its very important to establish a place where you child can study without being distracted by the television or younger siblings.
Review their homework.Always have your children show you what they did at school and check their homework with them. It shows them that you think it is important and then they will think is important. It will also keep you up to date with the progress they are making.
Meet with their teachers.Remember, your children are probably spending more time with their teacher than anyone else, aside from yourself. Teachers can give invaluable insight into the kind of person your child is becoming. Parents have a hard time being objective about their own kids, it is only natural. That’s why it is so important that you know the person that is guiding your children’s education.

Saturday, September 22, 2012

Forex Trading Education

Many times, investors are affected by current events and do not even realize it. This is the power of psychology. It has a great influence on how trades are created, and most of the players are unaware of how this most persuasive factor works. The market is also heavily dependent on these types of moves, and thus psychology also has an indirect impact on it as well.
This is due to the fact that while everybody has access to the same news, a different conclusion is most likely drawn because each person has a unique internal make up. This is also because most men are not logical in their thinking. It can be due to a variety of factors, but greed is one of the major governing influences. The news can also create the fear of impending doom. Investors can unjustly make a determination that isn't true. They fail to see the big picture, and as a result often don't realize the potential for profit that probably exists. These situations arise as a result of good news or even disasters.
The crucial element is some way to move the market. A wise speculator sits and waits to see how the market is influenced. They can then wisely make their entrance when the fool is missing the boat. Of course, many of these people don't know until the situation is untenable.
It is also the true power of psychology as applied to the Forex market. That is why the investor who is able to keep his head, will allow other players to move the market first, and then take advantage of this. These trends are driven by people responding to news stories or even rumors that are overheard. They react quickly, without taking the time to adequately assess the situation.
That is one of the primary reasons that 95% of this market lose money. The other 5% are certainly glad that psychology has lent them a hand. It may be the key to untangling some of the messes that investors tend to find themselves in at times. But in all reality, psychology can be a powerful motivator. It can be used for positive gains on the part of the careful speculator. But on the other hand, trading without proper evaluation is simply foolish.
Psychology plays a bigger role than most traders realize, and it can help to influence the marketplace directly and indirectly.
NOTE: By researching and comparing the best forex trading systems and platforms in the market, you will determine the one that meets your very specific financial situation and experience level.

Saturday, September 8, 2012

Wikis Enhancing Education

A number of educational institutions have opted to upgrade out-of-class interaction by leveraging wiki software to create easily accessed and edited wikis for teachers and students to interact. While web 2.0 solutions such as wikis and social media have been shunned by some government agencies and businesses, they have provided an easy option for teachers and professors to establish a web presence and reach students outside of the classroom.
The enterprise wiki is still a prominent way for executives and other managers to interact with their employees, but its optimum use may be in the classroom. For many educators, developing a highly functional website can be difficult since it requires web hosting and knowledge of design. Meanwhile, wikis can be implemented with minimal knowledge of web design and do not require as much maintenance as websites.
The Yale Daily News, the student newspaper at the Ivy League university in New Haven, Connecticut, recently reported the Yale School of Art's primary website is a wiki, which has allowed faculty and administrators to take a more proactive approach when interacting with their students and alumni. Students also have access to the website, which allows them to make announcements more quickly and to a larger audience.
"We wanted the website to be a transparent window onto the art school," Dan Michaelson, a lecturer and alumnus at the university, told the news provider. "There's no reason why the website shouldn't be a space that belongs to the students as much as the building."
Similarly, Bowling Green University in Ohio has a number of wikis currently operating throughout its network, according to BG Views. Among the items available for students and other members of the university are tutorials on various programs at the school, homework assignments, test dates and class and campus discussion forums. Also, some professors have made free textbooks available on wikis, which has helped students save money without falling behind on their schoolwork.
Like many other aspects of IT, such as agile development, wikis have made certain organizations and programs more interactive and accessible for those involved. Implementing them along with other Web 2.0 solutions, such as social media and blogs, is an easy way to ensure that an organizations is taking advantage of all the technology and options available to them.

Saturday, September 1, 2012

Physical Therapy Continuing Education

ACL related Physical Therapy continuing education courses have taught us there are four factors, that can be addressed through exercise, that decrease the risk of anterior cruciate ligament injuries in the female athlete. We recently interviewed an ACL expert to expand on this. Here is what he had to say.
Interviewer: So we now know about ligament dominance, quadriceps dominance, leg dominance and trunk dominance. Is there anything we can do about these things?
ACL Expert: So, we think these four neuromuscular imbalances underlie these four mechanisms that relate to ACL injury risk that we see more often in than males, in females.
So, what I've been talking about so far is really the bad news of this entire situation.
Interviewer: Okay.
ACL Expert: The good news is that - you know people have conjectured for years that this is really related to female anatomy; wider hips or a greater quadriceps angle, and they've thrown out that it's related to hormones, it's related to the estrogen surge in the middle of the menstrual cycle and that's what leads to a weaker ACL and greater injury risk.
There's no doubt that this is a multi-factoral problem, however, our findings related to these neuromuscular imbalances give us all hope because neuromuscular control is one thing we can readily change. Women can adapt to interventions and neuromuscular control training that can make them better, that can reduce not only these neuromuscular imbalances that we've shown in the lab - in the mid-'90s we did a series of studies where we showed we could use neuromuscular control training to alter and reduce some of these neuromuscular imbalances that I talked about, actually all of them, and then we could take those exact same interventions out onto the field and drop relative injury risk by about half.
Interviewer: Wow.
ACL Expert: That's the good news in all this. Yes, these findings that it is primary neuromuscular is really good because that's the one area - we really can't alter anatomy and we don't really want to play around with hormones too much without getting ourselves in a fair amount of trouble. But, neuromuscular control we can alter and we can do that.
The only sort of side effect of neuromuscular training is a more athletic individual. So, the side effects you get out of this training, in attempts to reduce these relative neuromuscular control deficits, is you get not only probably a safer athlete with an effect size of about 50 percent, but in these young women who have low powered engines relative to the size of their machine you increase that power and control and relative muscle recruitment, and you also not only have maybe a 50 percent reduction in risk, you have anywhere between a 10, 20, 100 percent increase in power and neuromuscular control, depending on what you're looking at. That's the good side effect you get out of this training.
It's also very similar to what you do - what we did is we took these exercises from athletic development training, from rehab, and they work well not only to create greater neuromuscular control and potentially lower risk, but also a more balanced, more powerful, more in control athlete.