Knowledge is Power

After bidding adieu to the Bush era, many parents and concerned citizens experience lingering indignation toward the ineffectualness of the No Child Left Behind Act. Fortunately, institutions like Teach for America target twenty-nine urban and rural areas where educational inequality has hit the hardest. With only 45.3 percent of high school graduating seniors, the Los Angeles Metropolitan area is one of the nation’s most prominent regions of educational disparity. One of the goals of Teach for America is to ensure that a child’s birthplace does not determine his or her education and life prospects. For the 2008 school year, Teach for America has employed 350 teachers to alleviate the education gap in underserved schools in Los Angeles. As there has been a 42 percent increase in Teach for America applicants for the 2009 school year, Teach for America staff will continue to improve students’ performances in Los Angeles schools in 2009.

For applications due February 13th, Los Angeles candidates had the choice to sign up for several interview dates and locations throughout Los Angeles. Applicants signed up for interviews at three venues including McKinsey & Company in downtown Los Angeles. They attended interviews consisting of a five minute teaching presentation, problem solving activities, a group activity, and a personal interview. These rigorous evaluations were designed to provide interviewers with a way assess the dedication, preparedness, and stamina of future teachers and educational leaders in underfunded Los Angeles communities. Such communities include Baldwin Park, Compton, Los Angeles, Lynwood, and Pasadena.

In the five minute teaching presentation, applicants demonstrated their organizational aptitude and ability to teach key academic subjects. The subjects and grade levels chosen for five minute teaching presentations reflected the subjects taught most by corps members in LA , including: Secondary English, Secondary Science, and Secondary Math. To ensure successful funding for these grades and subject levels, twenty-eight percentage of Teach for America’s budget is used for corps member’s professional development. Twenty percent is devoted to pre-service training; eighteen percent for recruitment and selection; sixteen percent for national support; six percent for alumni support and development; and five percent is dedicated to local program administration.

Without support from corporate and public foundations, Teach for America would be unable to fulfill its increasing budget demands. The organization receives corporate and public support from such companies as The Ahmanson Foundation, The Eisner Foundation, MSST Foundation, The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation, State Farm Insurance, Symantec Corporation, and The Weingart Foundation. These contributions make it possible for Teach for America to extend its services to new regions such as the Mississippi Delta and Greater New Orleans, in addition to expanding the corps’ population in Los Angeles.

You may wonder why Teach for America generates such a colossal impact on students’ lives. Why are so many organizations donating funds to support a non-profit organization when there are qualified teachers who already exist? Do schools in Los Angeles really need Teach for America or is the corps’ presence in Southern California superfluous, especially during a time of such profound economic hardship?

To avoid sounding like a propaganda flier, I have to admit that the selection process is far from transparent. It is difficult to know what you, as an applicant, are being tested for when you have to participate in a phone interview, write two essays, provide two references, give a five minute teaching presentation, demonstrate your quantitative problem solving skills, and participate in a group critical thinking activity. During various times during the interview process I yearned to see some kind of rubric to learn what assessments carried the most weight. The program–despite a few opaque accountability factors—is, nevertheless, an invaluable community resource for college graduates and school aged children alike. As Wall Street plummets, Teach for America staff have derived inspiration from public service and giving children hope for a better future.

This non-profit organization spends three months training new teachers before placing them in a school. With rigorous standards and intense preparation, teachers learn how to manage a classroom, teach effectively, and use creative problem solving skills to last them the full two years of their service. Many principals have shown their enthusiasm for the program, admitting that they would hire more Teach for America instructors in the future. Even though the Los Angeles School district is not at a loss for teachers, it can always benefit from energetic, highly focused do-gooders supported by an effective structure. What separates the Teach for America program from normal Los Angeles schools? Corps members spend more than six hours a day educating their students. If a student is falling behind a little or even drastically (it is not uncommon for Teach for America instructors to work with students three grade levels below their required math or reading levels), corps members will stay after school, arrange parent conferences, or do whatever they can to help their students on an individual level. It looks like our progeny do have hope!

http://www.CaliFindIt.com

If you are trying to get more traffic and improve your search engine rankings, learn a bit about LSI to enhance your SEO strategy. Here’s some helpful information to help you understand why taking time to sprinkle latent semantic indexing into your web content and article marketing efforts will be helpful to you.

Google Search Indexing

Not all search engines work the same but more often than not, the search engines continually tweak their algorithms. They do this as they discover more ways to do a better job at helping surfers find what they’re looking for and they make adjustments regularly to stop others from ‘gaming’ the system and gaining a significant advantage over other websites. If you’re anxious to learn all you can about improving the results of seo spiders that index your website, you need to identify what they’re looking at and ensure that they find what they want on each web page on your site, pointing to your site, and find what they like on the sites that your website points to. You can’t control all these factors all the time but there are things you can do to positively impact the results. LSI is something you should consider.

What is LSI?

Adding latent semantic indexing to your SEO strategy is a good idea and chances are, it’ll never expire in terms of being a key component of getting well indexed for your niche. The gist of latent semantic indexing is that search engine spiders look at your niche and also look at all the content on your pages to see how closely they relate to your main keywords. So if you’re selling computers, the spider will crawl your pages to look for other words related to computers such as: hardware, software, peripherals, etcetera. A lot of SEO specialists now create long keywords lists above and beyond the main keywords they want to rank for and try to weave as many terms into their content as possible.

Be sure, when you’re writing for latent semantic indexing, that you don’t overdo it. If you’re trying to get 20 keywords in above and beyond your main keyword, be sure the article is long. You don’t want a 10% keyword density otherwise all your efforts will be for naught as the search engines will think your site is ‘spam’.

Spend some time learning about various aspects of SEO when you build your pages and spend time researching and writing great content. When researching, look at many online tools that help you find great keywords. There are tools based on popular keywords and you’ll also find keyword analysis tools that help you reach a healthy density as well. Beyond that, you can use Google’s tilde operator which will help you identify laterally related words. To use it, type a ~ before your keyword and for the first several search engine results pages you’ll see bold words. Those words are words Google considers to be highly relevant to the main keyword.

There is no one magical success formula that fits all websites and all niches but the more that you do to learn about search engine optimization and effective search engine marketing strategies, the better your chances for success.

If you

You might wonder what there is about those Dress up Games that your daughter keeps talking about. You might dismiss them as mother versions of the old fashioned dress up games that you used to play with your mother’s clothes. It’s a bit like that, but dues to the nature of Internet, it’s become a world wide sensation.

Just what are those Dress Up Games?

The best way to understand them is to remember the paper dolls that you used to like so much. They had a paper or carton base, with a girl or a doll in undergarments. There were several paper dresses and clothing that you had to cut out as well so that you could dress your doll. The most creative of girls would make their own paper clothing so that they would always have new outfits for their dolls.

With technology and Internet available, those paper dolls have become virtual dolls that require clicking and dragging rather than cutting and pasting. With people from all over the world creating new ones every day, the number of sites with dress up games has increased enormously. And with each site having at least a few dozen games, there’s really not a limit to the number of dolls that your daughter can play with.

Virtual Dolls; the Descendents of Paper Dolls

Although the game mechanic is the same, virtual dolls have a far wider range of clothing styles. While paper dolls came in a set that had only a few pieces of clothing, Virtual doll’s pieces of clothing are limited to the imagination of the designer.

In addition, paper doll’s clothing was rather conservative and conventional, with only a few variations of dresses, skirts and blouses that didn’t really defy the imagination. Virtual dolls can become students, teachers, policewomen, astronauts, pirates, singers, actresses and pretty much anything your daughter wishes to be when she grows up.

What’s the point of Dress Up Games?

The same as with paper dolls; just to have fun by dressing up a doll. Girls play them for the same reason that you played paper dolls in your childhood. However, because they are in their most basic of nature, digital information, you can save them and give them other uses.

Avatars

An avatar is a representation of yourself in an online site that features social interaction. While a lot of people use pictures of themselves as avatars, this is not advisable, for safety reasons. Much less in the case of your own daughter! Saving a virtual doll as a picture and then loading the picture as an avatar will keep your daughter safer from strangers.

Illustrations for Stories

Most of the girls that play dress up games have a lot of imagination and creativeness. Her virtual doll could be the main character for her first story. Having a visual image of a character will make it easier to develop a story. Friends and enemies of the character can be created through a dress up game as well.

Vlad Stivenson, creator of dress up games for girls.