Back to School for GrownUps

One of my daily stops on my blog-hopping & dropping tour is the Fearless Blog … which has most recently been posting entries in a College Survival Guide .

Tip #1 suggests that you: Refrain from asking your college professors “Do I have to do this?” and provides the answer …which you can read right here .

Tip #2 is Do not show up for class: BE in class. I’m thinking that I might well provide all of my aviation management students this link ; they would do well to read it.

Tip #3 is  Don’t ever try to “wing it” on a test…another bit of advice I wish my students would read & heed.

All of the tips offered so far are well thought out, practical and most importantly, easily doable - well worth the few minutes of reading - and thinking - involved. I’ll be looking forward to more

So…. what do YOU do to try to mitigate the cost of textbooks?

With enough lead time, now, it is often possible to find the books you need online … although that works better if the  book has been around for awhile. For brand new publications, not so much.

I am fortunate - in English courses, the majority of the books we study have been around for eons… many of them can be found cheap in used book stores.  I did get caught this time ’round. One of my profs wants that we should all have particular editions - so that even though I have the titles we need, I still had to go out and buy the ‘right’ versions today.Wasn’t too painful though - but it would have been if  I hadn’t just picked up my scholarship cheque.

ANYWAY…  if you have come up with strategies to help save on buying textbooks, feel free to share…. you never know who you might help.

So, I was talking to a friend from my undergrad university earlier today (cancelling our lunch ) but oh well… some things just can’t be helped.

Anyway, we were talking about classes, and papers and averages and so on …

She is a very good student, and gets very good grades - this semester managed an average significantly higher than mine.

And yet, I get scholarships and she does not.

Do you know why?

I apply for them!

Yes, there are a few scholarships that just fall down from heaven. Or whatever - someone nominates you, or you earn some sort of distinction that qualifies you. I’ve got two of those over the course of my back to school adventures - one of each sort, totalling $2,500.

But for the vast majority of scholarships that are available to students - including mature/ returning/ adult/ nontraditional or whatever you want to call us students must be APPLIED FOR!  My scholarship income to date from these types is $18,500. So far.

Yes there are a lot of hoops to jump through re: some of them …but even if it takes several hours to complete a scholarship application, if you are successful, that’s a whole lot of $$/hour.

There are all sorts of ways to find out about scholarships that are available to you. Google, as always, is your friend.

I honestly have not had much success with scholarships through online sites - but that could well be because …well … I haven’t actually followed through and applied for many of the one that come up through those sites.

Where I have had the most success is through the schools I have attended.

I’ve never been on a college or university website that didn’t have a link to resources re: financial awards & scholarships, I don’t think. Certainly not recently.

Laurentian U actually sends the forms out in email for its in-course scholarship - all one has to do, if their overall average is about 80%, is fill out the (very basic) darn forms!!!!  The amount one recieves is automatic based on overall average - I recieved $2500 last year; my friend would have gotten even more than that if only she had returned the forms!!!!  10 minutes of time for more than $2500 …. who doesn’t jump on that? 

Lots of people, that’s who …. DO NOT BE ONE OF THEM!!!

And you don’t even have to have great marks for a lot of them, either …. I mean, they tend not to fund people who are not passing - but there are all sorts of scholarships that are based on leadership, or need, or essay writing or nationality or employment or or or ….

There are millions & millions of dollars in scholarship money given to students young and old every year in both Canada and the U.S.

Have you asked for your share?

What are you waiting for?

I highly recommend you start with your own college/university’s website - but don’t stop there. You will also want to try googling your province or state and scholarship - bet you’ll find more there.

Here are a few other sites you might want to try - and remember, google is your friend Lots more there also.

1. Scholarships.com
2. StudentAwards.com
3. FastWeb.com

If you have had experience in finding and winning scholarships, why not drop a comment and help to encourage other people to do the same?

Today, I gave a workshop in the use of Webspiration software as part of my university’s T3: Teaching Technologies Training Conference. While it was a fairly small group, participants were enthusiastic about the possibilities webspiration offers for a variety of classroom and seminar uses. The funniest thing was that several were planning to also attend the session this afternoon about using the Inspiration software as well - and the presenter for that session was also in this one It would have been better to have reversed the order of the sessions, I think… next time.

We covered the basics of using it, as well as some possible applications for working with our students both in small groups and on a one:one basis.

That was actually the most exciting idea for me, I think … I have used it with groups - but one of the profs that was there suggested that it could be used for one:one support of a student needing assistance with an essay, for example. I had not thought of using it like that - but as soon as she said it, I realized how very well that could work as a means for assisting students to get their essays off to a great start.

I have several students in my seminars that have emailed me to ask me to provide feedback on thesis statements or introductory paragraphs …. webspiration could make that whole process SO much easier. I am going to suggest it to them next time.

They can go online and map out their ideas about their essay topic and then invite me to join them - at which point I can easily see where they have gaps or need redirection, make comments, and set them on their way again.

Anyway, the workshop went well; it was small and informal, and I think people had fun playing. I know I did.

Now I am looking forward to seeing how well my students apply what they have learned through using Webspiration in our seminars. They have their exam on Saturday, and as preparation, I worked through mindmapping a close reading of a sample passage with them, and strongly encouraged them to sketch a mindmap out on paper when they are preparing to write the close reading essays on the exam. I will be watching for bubbles and lines on their rough work!

Ever tried Inspiration software?

Not everyone likes mindmapping - but for those of us who benefit from it, Inspiration is a great program. It lets you put all of your ideas about a topic - or topics - on one screen, and manipulate and notate it as required.

You can use colours, or pictures to pretty it up.

When I am having trouble deciding on a topic, or organizing my thoughts for an essay, I often play in Inspiration for a bit. Sometimes, I will end up mapping the same topic over and over before it gels in my head.

Inspiration is particularly useful for people who have learning disabilities - but it helps me a whole bunch, as well.

With one click of a button, you can switch from mapping view to outline view - and the outline can be exported to MS Word or whatever… very cool!

You can download a free trial from the website - although, if you are using Vista, you have to install it a bit differently to get it to work.

For Vista, once you’ve downloaded the file, right click on it and choose Properties. On the compatibility tab, tick the box to Run This Program in Compatibility Mode (Windows XP w/ Service Pack II). Then doubleclick on the file to install it.

Now they also have a new program available online in Beta. Called Webspiration, it is like Inspiration except for the fact that it is online and collaborative. You can give access to your mindmaps to anyone you like …in my case, it’s great, as I can work with my seminar students and we can map the novels we are working on. And, of course, for as long as the Beta trial lasts, it lets them use Inspiration for free.

I will be interested to see what they do with it once it’s out of beta - hoping that won’t happen anytime soon! And certainly not before I am scheduled to give a workshop in how to use it!

I have spent the last half an hour or so printing off materials I need for this week’s class. ONE class - well over 100 pages!

Fortunately, there are ways to cut costs down - once you know to go look, anyway.

Most printers are set, by default, to print good quality, and on only one side of the page.

But that doesn’t mean you have to go with those. Draft quality printing is fine for most purposes - I use it for almost all of my printing. It is a bit lighter - but legible. And it uses a lot less ink!

I also try to remember to go in and change the print settings to print two-sided.

Both the print quality and two-sided printing are available in the print properties of most printers. It is well worth the time to go exploring - your ink and your paper will last a lot longer!

Reading on a computer screen is too difficult - but at least with a bit of playing with properties, I can reduce the environmental impact of my studies.

Just checked my email account at my old university … there was a notice re: a new Textbook/Technology grant being offered to all full time university/college students in Ontario. Right now, the grant amount is only $150/year… the notice says it is going to go up to $300. Gotta like that.

Don’t have to actually qualify for OSAP or anything - which is good, since between our assets and my scholarship, ain’t no way that I would ever qualify even if I didn’t hate them (the feeling is mutal). Filled out an online form; they confirm enrollment and then mail out a check.

Me likey, as my kid would say.

Always nice to find money, innit?

If you happen to be a full time student in Ontario, here’s a fact sheet about it - you do NOT have to be OSAP eligible to apply.

I’ve been researching text to speech software this evening.

Last year, when I was driving 2.5 hours + each way to school and back, I often listened to school related materials in the car as I drove.

It worked quite well for me - I needed to ‘read’ a whole lot of classics - many of which I was able to download, for free, from librivox.com. The downloading was a bit of a pain - in order to keep the file sizes small, many of the works are divided into relatively small sections - so, to download all of Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, for example, required that I download 20 files.

But, once I had them, I could hop in the car, start the first one, and iTunes would just move through them one after another (in the correct order) beautifully.

It was a much better use of my driving time that listening to whatever was on the radio.

So - this year - still lots of driving time I could use - but I’m really not working much with any ancientLit of the sort that is available on Librivox - most of what I need to read is really exciting stuff that comes in pdf form - i.e. peer-reviewed, academic journal articles that are downloaded from online databases through our university library.

There are millions of the things - and the chances that someone is going to come along and voluntarily record and make available the ones I happen to need are slim to none.

But I do have an awful lot of them - and it would be a huge time saver if I could listen to them as I drive.

So I have been exploring options.

Adobe actually has a Read Aloud option under the View menu. Tried it - doesn’t work worth a darn for me.

It is greyed out/not available on a lot of the ‘justice’ pdfs I have downloaded for my course in Law and Moral Regulation in Neo-Liberal times.

And even in the files where it is not greyed out, it crashes and burns every time I try to use it.

I have downloaded the free trial version of NaturalSoft’s Natural Reader - works for a relatively small section of a Word document - not at all for my pdfs, although it does say that it can/will. Dunno if the pay for version would read a whole Word doc without my having to select a new section and hit play again - do know that that sort of thing is not such a good idea while driving though!

Will have to do some more research before I cough up some money for software, I think!

Recommendations cheerfully accepted!

As you can see, I have begun adding some resource links to the blogroll … not that many yet - mostly because I am working on my brand spanking new back to school laptop. It is very, very pretty …and also very, very fast compared to either of my 2 older computers (yes, I am a geek as a matter of fact!) … but I do not yet have the track pad sorted out. I need a proper mouse.

At some point today, I shall get off my butt and go buy a proper mouse. But for now, I am making do, and getting frustrated… so more linking of resources will have to wait. I wonder if I can buy a purple mouse to match my laptop? Would that be just too much geekdom? Probably I will likely go for what ever is cheap - I don’t even want a wireless, as I have a history of snapping the little doomaflicky that goes in the USB port right off. Very expensive tendency!

So anyway - resources! I can stay on topic, really Sometimes. So far today has not shaped up to be one of those times, but I will get there. Soon. Hopefully. I have a 15 - 20 page psychology paper to write between now and when I start at Trent on Tuesday morning. It doesn’t HAVE to be done - but it would be SO nice to get it done and out of the way before I jump into the next bit. Will still have to arrange to write the exam for the course, also - but once the paper is done, the bulk of the course (and stress) will be finished.

I will continue to add to the resource links as I round them up or come across them - and eventually, will also write some articles re: specific resources and so on - but I certainly encourage you to share any resources you have come across in your travels with us, and will be happy to add them to the list.

What websites have helped you in your back to school as a grown up experience? Tell us about them!