Archive for August 2011
Middle School Career Education – The Bridge Between Elementary School and High School
Middle School is a bridge and threshold between Elementary School and High School, a time of transition.
Need for Middle School Career Education
Middle school career education lays the groundwork for future career development by helping students achieve the following goals:
Knowledge of personal characteristics, interests, aptitudes, and skills
Awareness of and respect for the diversity of the world of work
Understanding of the relationship between school performance and future choices
Development of a positive attitude toward work (Developmental Career Programs 1998)
Without Middle School Career Education, students fail to build a foundation and the connection between high school academic subjects, potential careers, world of work, and post-secondary training. As a result, students have poor self concepts, possess poor intrinsic motivation, lack self awareness, and make limited career choices.
Eventually, some of the students who fail to participate in a career education program drop out of school.
Benefits of Middle School Career Education
Middle School Students who complete career education programs have the following positive outcomes -
Enhanced understanding of the world of work leading to an openness to an increased number potential careers
Improved skills to make informed decisions and complex career information problem solving
Enhanced academic, personal, and teamwork skill development
Increased career awareness, self-esteem, clearly defined goals, a sense of direction, and motivation to persist and attain a post secondary education and training
National Career Development Guidelines – Career Education Model
Teachers and counselors use the National Career Development Guidelines (NCDG) to create middle school career education resources, career self assessment tests and tools. Career knowledge, skills, and decision-making processes use the NCDG Guidelines.
The NCDG Guidelines have three domains, goals, and indicators of mastery under each career development goal.
The three domains are:
Personal Social Development (PS)
Educational Achievement and Lifelong Learning (ED)
Career Management (CM)
The learning competency stages are:
Knowledge Acquisition (K). Middle school students at the knowledge acquisition stage expand knowledge awareness and build comprehension. They recall, recognize, describe, identify, clarify, discuss, explain, summarize, query, investigate and compile new information about the knowledge.
Application (A). Middle school students at the application stage apply acquired knowledge to situations and to self. They seek out ways to use the knowledge. For example, they demonstrate, employ, perform, illustrate and solve problems related to the knowledge.
Reflection (R). Middle school students at the reflection stage analyze, synthesize, judge, assess and evaluate knowledge in accord with their own goals, values and beliefs. They decide whether or not to integrate the acquired knowledge into their ongoing response to situations and adjust their behavior accordingly.
The Relation between Life Insurance and the Future of the Ones You Love
Do you still think that a life insurance is a thing that can help you financially only in some situations, such as accident or death? Indeed, it is not. There is a thing more important that you will be able to find in a life insurance.
It is actually something related to the future of the ones you love. Take your children as one of the examples. When you get a life insurance, you actually save some of your cash so that when you are unable to make more cash, you can claim the life insurance for whatever it is, such as the college fee of your children. Another example can be seen when you are death and leave some amount of debt to be paid by your children. The life insurance can be the most suitable financial help for your children to be able to pay the debt that you left.
There are so many life insurance companies that you will be able to find in nowadays. You may visit Lifeinsurancerates.com to get one best life insurance that is most suitable with you and your financial condition. Get a life insurance as soon as possible and provide your loved ones security in the future.
Having The Best Home Business Ever
Today many people online and offline are looking for the best home business to join. Many people are looking for the home business that will make them rich. Many are looking for that home business that requires little if any work and produces huge results overnight.This is the something for nothing approach which many people take with them when looking for and starting a home business. People are looking for the best home business ever. Many people are missing the boat when it comes to looking for a solid home business. Instead of looking at what counts like training, mentoring, and the overall home business itself. They are looking at how much they can make with little or no work. Plus many people want results overnight. There is no such thing as the best home business ever. There is no such thing as a home business that will make you rich overnight. And there is no such thing as a home business that will make you rich with you only working 10 minutes a day. All of these claims are false but what is true is you can become very wealthy by starting and running a home business.
You see your home business is just a vehicle to get you from point A to point B. Think of a home business as a car. If you know the basics of operating a car, you will know how to drive almost any car model out there. Just like a home business, it doesn’t matter what home business opportunity you join, if you know how to build a home business you will succeed. See many people think the home business makes you rich but that is false, it is the home business owner that makes the business successful or unsuccessful. Having a home business is just like having a car, when you get into your car you have to start it and push the gas pedal in order for you to go anywhere. The same goes for home business, you have to start it and work your home business in order for it to go anywhere. You don’t expect your car to drive you around and you shouldn’t expect your home business to succeed without your involvement and effort.
How To Make The Most Of Your Home Business
A work at home business opportunity seems like a dream come true to most people. However, although there are many positive things about a work at home business opportunity, there are also some pitfalls that some people may not realize exist. Here are some suggestions for making the most of your work at home business opportunity.
First, it is very helpful to develop a simple system of organization for the paperwork involved in your work at home business opportunity. Keeping things well organized is key to maintaining excellence in your work at home business opportunity. Developing some sort of simple framework for organization will help streamline time and efforts when things get busy with your work at home business opportunity.
With your work at home business opportunity, you may also find that it is helpful to set specific hours of operation. Sometimes, being at home can seem to others as if you are available any time they need you. Setting up actual hours of operation helps to separate responsibilities to clients of your work at home business opportunity, family members, and friends, in a way that is manageable.
A work at home business opportunity creates a need for much self-reliance and organization. Making a list of things that need to be done each day will also help ensure that nothing important is missed within your work at home business opportunity. It also helps to set deadlines for each project related to your work at home business opportunity. This helps many people who tend to put things off, as a work at home business opportunity does not allow for procrastination. When you are pursuing a work at home business opportunity, it also may be a good idea to write down a list of objectives. Then, take the list of goals related to your work at home business opportunity, and share it with someone else. Keeping yourself accountable in this way will often help compel you to finish the tasks you set out to complete within your work at home business opportunity.
When pursuing a work at home business opportunity, another good idea is setting up a home office or workspace in one’s house. Rather than working in a main part of the house where many people come and go, it is helpful to move your work at home business opportunity to a quieter room or area where you can concentrate. This is also helpful when one is making phone calls related to a work at home business opportunity.
Protecting Your Income and Investments
Protecting your income is an important thing to do as they won’t be there forever for you. You could use the service of insurance that protect your income.
It’s easy, you could find them in XLife where they provide the many kind of services for you, including income protection.
You just have to fill the income protection quotes and you’re ready to be protected and start paying the monthly fees.
The Top Five Secrets To Advertising Strategies – Starting With Your First Ad
1) promote awareness of a business and its product or services;
2) stimulate sales directly and “attract competitors’ customers”; and
3) establish or modify a business’ image. In other words, advertising seeks to inform, persuade, and remind the consumer. With these aims in mind, most businesses follow a general process which ties advertising into the other promotional efforts and overall marketing objectives of the business.
An advertising strategy is a campaign developed to communicate ideas about products and services to potential consumers in the hopes of convincing them to buy those products and services. This strategy, when built in a rational and intelligent manner, will reflect other business considerations (overall budget, brand recognition efforts) and objectives (public image enhancement, market share growth) as well. Even though a small business has limited capital and is unable to devote as much money to advertising as a large corporation, it can still develop a highly effective advertising campaign. The key is creative and flexible planning, based on an in-depth knowledge of the target consumer and the avenues that can be utilized to reach that consumer.
STAGES OF ADVERTISING STRATEGY
As a business begins, one of the major goals of advertising must be to generate awareness of the business and its products. Once the business’ reputation is established and its products are positioned within the market, the amount of resources used for advertising will decrease as the consumer develops a kind of loyalty to the product. Ideally, this established and ever-growing consumer base will eventually aid the company in its efforts to carry their advertising message out into the market, both through its purchasing actions and its testimonials on behalf of the product or service.
Essential to this rather abstract process is the development of a “positioning statement, a positioning statement explains how a company’s product (or service) is differentiated from those of key competitors. With this statement, the business owner turns intellectual objectives into concrete plans. In addition, this statement acts as the foundation for the development of a selling proposal, which is composed of the elements that will make up the advertising message’s “copy platform.” This platform delineates the images, copy, and art work that the business owner believes will sell the product.
Keeping Existing Customers Happy with Various Services for Customer Service Support
There are many ways to provide customer service support. Channels expand to include not only the telephone but also the Internet. I believe that you will have no misgiving on applying all of them in order to satisfy your customers, aside from an improved customer retention percentage. However, it is too burdensome, considering the relatively high costs, complexities, time and effort associated with such services. It is onerous to run an in-house call center today.
This bad news is, however, a blessing in disguise. How so? Well, it compels you to choose another option, which is better, cheaper and more effective. And this second but best choice is outsourcing. Best-in-class inbound call centers can give you a flock of services at a light price. Your customers will be served by their competitive agents who are polite, fast-learners and versatile. Their technology is constantly upgraded to ensure that call center operations runs smoothly on updated infrastructure. And more than that, they host various services to fully satisfy your customers while opening more opportunities for your company’s growth. With all of these for an affordable price, it is not surprising to see improved client retention and customer experience, additional sales from cross-selling and up-selling, and a stronger brand.
Customer service support has greatly evolved. In the past, only inquiries and complaints are handled. During the later years of the 20th century hitherto, customer care included giving additional services in the form of order taking, reservation and booking. This allows more opportunities for both you and the public to have convenient ways of doing business. The conception of inbound call centers has helped firms, especially small-and-medium businesses (SMBs), to take advantage of the latest developments in customer service support.
As mentioned above, outsourcers of customer service support offer numerous services such as:
1. Comprehensive Live Answering Service. Agents are designated not only to answer phone calls but online concerns as well. While telephone operators are always ready when a phone rings, other agents are employed to cater customers, who are browsing a business website, through a live chat support. Where your customers are, there you should also go.
2. Automated Answering Service. It is costly to assign easy tasks, e.g. inquiry for credit card balance, to live operators. Agents must focus on calls involving complex activities, say for example, a problem with an Internet connection. This is so because these problems can consume a lot of time to be solved. This is why an automated answering service is installed to address simple concerns.
Ethics and Feminism Articles
What do we mean by ethics?
The word ethics comes from a Greek source meaning custom or habit. Ethical philosophy involves the study of right and wrong. Sometimes people use the word morality instead of ethics. Both morality and ethics are about finding out how we ought to live. Ethics is a major branch of philosophy. (The other branches being: epistemology or knowledge, metaphysics or the essential nature of things and logic or reason.
Approaches to Ethics
There are four possible ways of approaching ethics.
Descriptive ethics: involves the description of how things are or the customs of a society.
Normative ethics: is about making moral decisions or deciding what is right and what is wrong. There are two main ways of doing this, namely by intentions or moral rules relating to duty (deontological ethics) or by outcome (teleological).
Meta-ethics; this approach analyses the nature of ethics. It includes both realism and antirealism. Realism is the view that moral values can be discovered, possibly by using intuition. Antirealism is the view that morality is determined by people’s thoughts and feelings
Applied ethics: this is how ethical values may be used in specific circumstances. So for example, the study of abortion would involve an individual applying moral theory to the situation of abortion. In order to do this they may draw on both normative values those of meta-ethics.
Normative Ethics In More Detail
Teleological Theory
Teleological theory is also known as consequentialism and involves outcomes. One example of teleological theory is utilitarianism. According to this theory one should do what creates the most happiness for the greatest number of people. However utilitarians are divided about what happiness is. Some claim that happiness is simply pleasure but others claim it is about minimising pain. Two major exponents of utilitarianism are Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.
Jeremy Bentham produced the felicific calculus, or hedonic calculus. For Bentham one could calculate the actual amount of pleasure over pain using a sort of mathematical method. The calculus involves taking into account factors such as: intensity, duration and certainty of pleasure.
John Stuart Mill divided pleasure into higher and lower order, claiming cultural, spiritual and intellectual pleasures to be higher order in nature.