Category: College

If you’re a senior in HS looking to continue your tech education, we have a list of the ten best colleges that will help you perfect your skills:

10 Best Colleges in the USA to Study Computer Science

Computer Science is a desirable degree for many students as it has great prospects and is linked to innovation in technology. It is important to choose the right school for acquiring a degree. US colleges offer great education and some of them are the top choices, especially for Computer Science.

If you want to study in one of the top universities, choose one of the following colleges that are universally appraised.

1 MIT

No such list can be full without the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It has been leading almost any top list for many years and continues offering great education.

The Computer Science department is the largest at this college and provides excellent research and study opportunities. The representatives of MIT have made an outstanding contribution to the innovations in the fields of artificial intelligence, cybernetics, and robotics. The only downside is that studying here can be quite challenging as the curriculum is dense, so many students choose to use case study writing service to get help.

But it is what comes with one of the best programs in the country and the world.

2 Stanford University

Stanford is located near the famous Silicon Valley, which is known to be the capital of all technology and computer science in the world. It offers an outstanding program for students to apply.

The Computer department was founded in 1965 and has a prominent history. One of the main attractions for students is that a lot of top world technological corporations are located right near Stanford.

It is also known for helping students with their start-ups and offering a great Business program. Many young entrepreneurs started their companies as a university project.

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As High School seniors prepare to graduate, many will choose something about computers for their job or continued studies. Here’s a great overview from an Ask a Tech Teacher contributor of what one of those fields–working with the powerful algorithms that drive search and research–is about:

What are search engine algorithms?

For many students who are approaching school leaving age, they will already have decided the career path which they wish to take. Not surprisingly, given the role it plays in our everyday lives, many choose to pursue a career in IT. Of course, this is an incredibly broad topic. Still, in this article, we will focus predominantly on aspects relating to websites, moreover, how they can help to achieve business goals and other objectives.

As an international school in Hong Kong, we do all we can to prepare our students for going out into the workplace. Our various IT classes cover a wide range of topics with web development, e-commerce and SEO all being covered to some degree. Indeed, it is three areas, which are all interlinked, where most students wish to work, understanding the professional opportunities that are likely to present themselves. However, for a website to fulfil its potential, it must satisfy the needs of search engine algorithms.

What is an algorithm?

Algorithms are not a new phenomenon and have been used as a part of mathematics for thousands of years. They are often mistaken for being a formula but are in actual fact a series of different formulas or ingredients. They are often likened to preparing a meal for a large group. However, the meals may essentially be the same; different people like it to be cooked differently. Some people might want their meat cooked rare while others like it well done, some like salt, some like pepper, and so on. The algorithm means that a different formula is required for each person.

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Choosing what to do after high school used to be simple for those who had good grades: Apply to college. Now, not so much. For one thing, college has become increasingly more expensive and students are asking whether there’s enough value in what they get to offset the costs. Another worry: Colleges sometimes seem dangerous hotbeds of protests and riots. Professors seem biased rather than intent on opening minds.

Trade schools with their focus on preparing graduates for a career that contributes to society is an affordable, realistic option that even the best students are looking at. Here’s a quick decision matrix to help you through these options:

For more information, check out the plethora of articles Ask a Tech Teacher has on preparing for college or career:

MS Career Planning: Moving in the Right Direction

Study.com Makes the College Dream a Reality

Clutch Prep: When You Need Help With a Class

How to Prepare for the SAT

UWorld’s Unique SAT Prep Site

What to do when Johnny wants career, not college?

8 Websites For Financial Literacy Month

Jacqui Murray has been teaching K-18 technology for 30 years. She is the editor/author of over a hundred tech ed resources including a K-12 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum. She is an adjunct professor in tech ed, Master Teacher, webmaster for four blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice, CSTA presentation reviewer, freelance journalist on tech ed topics, contributor to NEA Today, and author of the tech thrillers, To Hunt a Sub and Twenty-four Days. You can find her resources at Structured Learning.

The latest national data reports that while a growing number of students graduate high school, college enrollments are decreasing. Students cite a lot of reasons for that:

• I can’t afford it
• I can’t get in
• It’s too hard
• I have a good job
• It isn’t worth it

Whatever is to blame, the result is that students increasingly take on the complicated economics of working and raising families without the knowledge, maturity, or experience to succeed at those. High schools are attempting to fill that gap by offering financial literacy classes that teach how to balance finite income from a job against infinite needs and wants.

Since April is Financial Literacy Month, I want to share my favorite online options, all age-appropriate for high school students and financial literacy classes:

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In a world where college fees go up every year, where the cost of campus-based classes invariably includes expensive extras, where the time commitment to complete college classes often can’t be balanced with work and family needs, Study.com stands out. These web-based classes offer motivated students a self-paced, self-directed path to achieving their college dreams in an affordable, flexible, quality ecosystem that prepares them for future careers in fields they love.

Study.com (formerly called Education-Portal) is a distance learning portal that provides over 70,000 lessons in fifteen subjects (including algebra, calculus, physics, chemistry, macro- and microeconomics, and more) aligned with popular textbooks. The engaging video summaries of textbook material provide access to more than a thousand full-length college courses.

Students sign up for a Study.com membership (there are three options) and take as many classes as they’d like each month. Depending upon the level of service subscribed to, students can view videos, take practice quizzes and exams, and get credit for classes passed through a proctored exam. All they need is an internet connection and a webcam (for proctored exams). Each course has about a hundred videos, each 5-10 minutes in length. In the College Accelerator membership, subscribers earn college credits that can be transferred to any one of over two thousand participating colleges and universities.

Study.com also offers a special (fee-based) Teacher Edition where educators can set up five virtual classrooms with up to 50 students in each, share class-themed videos, assign lessons and quizzes as homework, grade student work, print out worksheets, and get detailed reports on student progress.  Lessons can be pushed out to the entire class or specific students. They can be uploaded to Google Classroom, Schoology, Blackboard, and a selection of other LMSs. Students join with a free Study.com account that can be accessed with mobile apps (with the exception of proctored exams).

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Clutch Prep calls themselves “the video version of textbooks” but really, that doesn’t give you the full flavor of what they offer. Their academic how-to videos are textbook-specific so you pick the ones used in your classes, even by your teacher. Videos cover each chapter and can be used as a preview or review. Practice questions monitor understanding to see if you’re ready for summative tests. Answers include an explanation of how to reach the correct answer. Every student is assigned a tutor who is available to answer questions if needed.

So, yes, it’s academic video tutorials–Plus.

Clutch Prep was founded on the idea that students would prefer to re-learn a concept from scratch rather than patch the holes in their knowledge. Geared for college-level classes, this also works well for high school AP classes. With over 348,000 students answering 14,5000 discrete practice problems, 90% of whom improve their grades, it seems like a no-brainer. You can sign up for free to watch a limited number of videos. The full program requires a fee that varies depending on how many classes you take and how you pay.

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Taking the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) has become a right-of-passage for high school students as they leave formal education and enter the next phase of learning. Over seven million will take SAT tests in 2018 in January, March/April, May, June, October, November, or December. Some will take it for the first time; some for the umpteenth time. For many, it represents a last desperate attempt to qualify for the college of their dreams.

In an earlier article, I focused on preparation for the essay portion of the SAT. This time, I’ll discuss some of the great online sites that help students prepare for the math and reading portions. I’ve based my selections on the following criteria:

• ease of use — accounts are easy to set up with access to both the site and materials quick and intuitive
• well-rounded — nicely differentiated tools that address varied student learning styles
• quantity and quality of available prep materials — materials are both in-depth and in a variety of formats (written, online, video, live/chat) with explanations of answers
• cost vs. value — free is nice but if students get good value for fee-based resources, that’s just as important
• time commitment — students can spend as much or little time as they have on any given day

Here are eleven options for SAT preparation, from my Top Five choices to six Honorable Mentions. All are easy to use, differentiated, up-to-date on the recent changes to the SAT, and represent a good investment of both time and money:

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When I first visited UWorld’s College prep site, I expected what usually is included on free SAT/ACT prep sites–questions, answers, and a lot of cheerleading.

I should have known better. UWorld is a leading provider of question bank materials for professional licensing exams like USMLE, ABIM, and ABFM, considered by many to be the gold standard in test preparation. Now, UWorld has expanded into SAT prep (as well as ACT and AP prep). The site includes over 1200 questions written by experienced educators and designed to be similar to what students will find on the real SAT. With each question is a rigorous explanation, step-by-step instructions, and helpful images about the logic behind answers.

Features include:

• Choose your difficulty level–low, medium, hard.
• Get hints to help you find a starting point for the answer.
• Customize practice tests to focus on mastering specific concepts within subjects.
• Create your own flashcards for quick review.
• Track your time and performance to improve your pace.
• Monitor progress with reports and graphs.
• Compare your results to peers as a gauge of performance. This includes questions they got correct, how much time they took answering individual questions, and the types of questions they are struggling with.
• Identify weaknesses and improve strengths.
• Flag questions that you’d like to review later.
• Define difficult words from within the app (for reading prep).

Registered students can access questions at the pace they’d like, take full timed tests to build test-taking stamina, pause during testing, flag questions they want more work on, save generated tests to finish or retake later, and more.

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Moodle is an open source free cloud-based learning platform used by over 96 million people to create over 11 million courses. These can be a simple activity or a fully-featured course. The platform offers a plethora of tools to customize courses as pretty much whatever teachers need, including:

• Upload video, audio, and links
• Engage students in a discussion forum or a survey
• Create, conduct and grade quizzes
• Assign, collect, review and grade assignments

The problem with Moodle and what stops many educators from using it has nothing to do with its flexible and scalable platform. It’s just not intuitive enough. Australia-based VerveEd’s goal is to fix that. Using an experiential, self-paced environment, VerveEd walks teachers through all the steps needed to create and use the Moodle platform in a clear, organized fashion and then provides nine hands-on ‘challenges’ that users complete to assess their knowledge in a real-world (albeit sandbox) Moodle environment.  Challenges include topics such as:

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