CashCrunch Careers Survey (What do I want to be when I grow up?)

With an eighteen-year-old in the house, my next review was definitely one of interest, especially as he isn't certain what direction he wants to go in the future. CashCrunch Games has put together an online tool, CashCrunch Careers, using information from the US Department of Labor and corporate recruiting to help answer the questions people might have as they are weighing the pros and cons of higher education and future employment. 

The basic concept is that there are many career options that are suitable for each individual's strengths, but sometimes some of those career options might be overlooked because they don't jump right out at a person. For example, a career in law enforcement doesn't necessarily point only to regular police officer work. Dispatchers, clerical workers, detectives, scientists, and positions like parole officers, which might be considered more social, all fall under that umbrella. 

Because I haven't been in the greater workforce for almost 2 decades, I decided that I would take this CashCrunch Career survey also (high school was a LONG time ago for me... and things (and I) have changed. I figured it would be interesting to see how our results compared as well.

So, the first thing to do once you have an account and are logged in is to take the survey, which is 75 questions long. It's one of those "Choose which of these words best describes you." I honestly don't know anyone who actually enjoys taking these sorts of surveys because they are very difficult to answer, particularly when some of the words seem so closely related.

Here are some examples of the questions in the survey:

Once you've filled out the survey, your report is accessible (for as long as you might need it) to return to and revisit/investigate various employment sectors that might be good fits for you. 

It was rather interesting to see the overlap (but not complete overlap) of both my and my son's results...

My Son's Matches

My Matches

From here you can click on each career area for more definition... This is an example of my #15 match, Food Service Manager. You can see that while there is a much slower than average projected growth in this "Hospitality and Tourism" sector, there is a high projected need of 83,7000 (this is somewhat confusing to me in that there are other career options that are listed as having a faster than average growth, but the projected need is less than 10,000). 

When I clicked on the Hospitality and Tourism link on the left there Food Service Manager was one of thirty-nine possible job descriptions (as were Lodging Manager and Gaming Manager, which also showed up on my list). I also found it rather interesting that 16 of 20 job matches were "managerial positions. I'm not quite sure how I feel about that, but to some degree, it does make sense based on my life experience for the past 20 years. :)

One of the things I would like to see would be the option to take the survey more than one time. I find that sometimes I might want to change some of my answers and see what sort of difference that would make. My son was wondering the same thing. We were also thinking that sometimes it would be nice to have a "neither" or "both equal" option for most of the words, as sometimes it was just very difficult to choose.

CashCrunch Careers is only one of the offerings of CashCrunch Games.
CashCrunch Jr. ($32.50) for ages 5-12 is a physical board game that helps kids think about the value of money.
CashCrunch 101 for ages 13-21 is currently a free online one-player personal finance game.
Personal Finance Bite-Size ($40) is a lesson resource for teaching high school and college finance classes. If you are a SchoolhouseTeachers.com member you can access this course for free from your member dashboard.

Not So Nutty Nitty Gritty 

• Company: CashCrunch Games
  
  
• Product: CashCrunch Careers
• Ages: I would recommend High School - Adult
• Price: $99

You can visit CashCrunch Games on their social media pages on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram,  YouTube

Please click the banner below to visit the TOS Homeschool Review Crew and see what others had to say. As always, I hope that this review was useful to you as you choose where best to spend your homeschool budget.

Blessings~

#hsreviews #cte #careers #careerpathway #collegeready #careerreadiness #dreamcareer #dreamjob #careerpossibilities #college #recruitment #changeofcareer

SpeedyPrep ~ CLEP test preparation courses (A Review)

If you have a high school student or college student, you may be interested in this latest review product, CLEP preparation courses by SpeedyPrep. These courses are geared towards students who have already taken high school level classes in a given subject and feel they are probably proficient enough to test out of their basic college level classes (Which is a HUGE cost savings, tuition-wise).

What courses are offered? As you can see in the graphic above, there are 33 college subjects that can be "clepped" or tested out of. SpeedyPrep offers preparation for 24 of those courses:

• Business
• Introductory Business Law
• Information Systems
• Principles of Management
• Principles of Marketing
• Principles of Macroeconomics
• Principles of Microeconomics
• Foreign Language
• Spanish
• History and Social Sciences
• American Government
• US History I
• US History II
• Western Civilization I
• Western Civilization II
• Humanities
• Literature
• Analyzing and Interpreting Literature
• American Literature
• English Literature
• College Composition
• Mathematics
• College Algebra
• College Mathematics
• Psychology and Human Development
• Introductory Psychology
• Introductory Sociology
• Human Growth and Development
• Science
• Biology
• Natural Sciences

You can read specifics about each course if you visit the SpeedyPrep website and click on the courses tab. There are details about what is covered and how the CLEP exam is laid out. This is a screenshot of part of the information on Western Civilization I:

Lots of great information to read on the website to discover if SpeedyPrep is a good option for your student.

If we had known credits my Eldest's college would accepts while she was still in high school, we might have chosen to use SpeedyPrep in place of the online math course whose credits her college of choice does not accept. I would have been pretty happy with the SpeedyPrep guarantees. It states that if a student masters 90% or more of their course, they are guaranteed to pass the CLEP exam or SpeedyPrep will refund up to three months of the subscription fees used to study for the test. More details can be found on their Guarantee page.

Subscriptions are for 1 month, 3 months, and yearly, and each subscription is meant for only one student/user, and allow that student to access the materials for every course offered by SpeedyPrep. The materials can be accessed on any device (desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone), anywhere there is wifi capability.

The program is a mastery program, so material will be covered more than once to ensure that it maintains space in the student's memory bank, with reasonably easy recall. The goal is to fill in the progress bar to the 90-100% range, and then schedule a CLEP exam fairly soon thereafter. Details/information on scheduling exams (not done through SpeedyPrep) can be found on the SpeedyPrep FAQs page.

My daughter decided to spend some time on the SpeedyPrep site (fitting it in around her works schedule as time permitted), to see what the math courses looked like (since she had been counting on her high school math courses being accepted for credit at her college, she figured this was an option to minimize that disappointment).

Over the course of 15 study sessions (At the time of the dashboard screenshot below)  she was only able to complete about 2.5% of the course. From this screen, she could access the course by clicking "study now"  on the specific course that she had started (The top two squares, by clicking study now in the "all courses" listing, OR click the course name in the "all courses" listing and specify which section she wanted to study. However, the only way to know which section she should work on (unless she was willing to accept the random study session assigned) would be to see her progress by clicking the "course progress" button.

One of the things that I think could use some tweaking in this program is the ability to choose which section to study... Here is a screenshot of course progress after those 15 study sessions. You can see that a variety of topics were studied, my impression is somewhat arbitrarily:

As you can see progress is listed by section, but the only way to choose which section to work on is to remember which topic you want to work on and click "study now" and choose that course. I would like to see the ability to choose to complete "Complex Imaginary Numbers Part 1" for example, before going on to Complex Imaginary Numbers Part 2, and an intuitive way to do that would be to click on the name of the section from the progress page to resume studying.

Currently there are too many steps to choose your topic rather than taking what is randomly assigned...

On to the practical~
This is an example of the SpeedyPrep flashcard method of studying ( I decided to use a course that my daughter was not planning to study to give you screen shot examples to that I wouldn't mess up the logarithm for her courses) :

Please notice that this study style requires an answer to be typed in, there is no multiple choice like there is in on the CLEP exam. The very good reasoning behind this is that if you have to type in the answer, you obviously know it.

Now, I came into this with no prior study experience, and thought my choice of word "exertion" wasn't bad, and indeed, it is a synonym for the correct answer of labor. This shows up as incorrect in SpeedyPrep, but I can tell that I would have chosen "labor" out of a multiple choice selection. And next time this question comes up, I'll know which word they are looking for.

I think this is a great way to study/prepare for a test, and although time has not allowed my daughter to get to that 90% guaranteed pass goal just yet, I think she will keep working on it to see if she can get at least one or two courses out of the way. Of course, there aren't many of them that will apply to her Art Education degree, but Math and Literature should fit right in.

Not So Nutty Nitty Gritty 

• Company: SpeedyPrep 
• Product: Speedy Prep Courses
• Ages: High School -> Adult
• Price: 
• Monthly Subscription $24.95 with access to all courses
• Quarterly Subscription $63.62 (10% savings) with access to all courses for 3 months
• Yearly Subscription $$194.61 (35% savings over the monthly cost) with access to all courses for a full year

Visit SpeedyPrep on their social media sites: Twitter and Facebook 

Please click the banner below to visit the TOS Homeschool Review Crew and see what others had to say. As always, I hope that this review was useful to you as you choose where best to spend your homeschool budget.

Blessings~

#hsreviews #collegeprep #clepprep

Fortuigence Review (Personal Essay Writing Program)

I don't know about you, but sometimes having a senior in high-school and looking ahead to college can be a little bit intimidating. So many thing to prepare for, not the least of which is writing a personal essay for college admissions. This is why I was very pleased to be asked to review the Essay Rock Star Personal Statement Writing Course, one of 4 courses in the Essay Rockstar series by Fortuigence.  Other TOS Review Crew families received one of the other three courses in the Rock Star Writing Course~ Persuasive Essay, Expository Essay, and Textual Analysis, so be sure to click the link at the end of my review to read their experiences.

The Essay Rockstar series is a unique program with an online classroom and assignments, followed up with personal email feedback from a professional teacher, Lily Iatridis, founder of Fortuigence. This is the first time that my daughter has received formal writing instruction and feedback from anyone other than myself, so it was very much something new for us both.

This particular course has 7 lessons and assignments.

1. Intro/Pre-assessment
2. Brainstorming
3. Organizing Ideas
4. Free Writing
5. Revision
6. Editing
7. Wrap-up

The lessons are video segments with Lily, who is very pleasant and professional to listen to. The assignments are submitted online in the "classroom" with feedback provided by email within 24 hours. The student can also "Ask a question" of the teacher from the classroom. All of the communication goes directly to the student, very much like in a typical classroom. In order for me to keep up with what was happening, my daughter forwarded the feedback emails to me, and I logged into her "classroom" to see her assignments and submitted work.

Here is an example of something of Lily's video lesson style:


My daughter enjoyed this new-to-us concept, and was very pleased to be given some very positive feedback on her assignments, as she has been a reluctant writer in the past. She was pleasantly surprised to find out that "good readers make good writers" really does hold true (at least in her case). As a matter of fact, the feedback was the source of big smiles a couple of times... "Wow! Mom! I didn't expect all those adjectives!" was her immediate reaction when reading the assessment of some of her submitted work.

While Eldest really doesn't enjoy doing things step-by-step (Because she wants to be done now... economy of motion morphed into economy of brainwork?), she felt that it was very helpful to break things down, so that she had a better handle on what to do when, and how.

We are both looking forward to her finished essay (She is currently in the final draft/editing lesson), and will be able to give a sigh of relief to have that item more or less checked off from her college application "To Do" list. She had a bit of "writer's block"(I added a color overlay to her notebook page to preserve her privacy), and all those flower doodles... those would be the creative person's response to writer's block... :)

Her instructor never saw this sheet~ it is all transcribed to the computer for submission, but I thought it was fun. :)

For those who have never done an online/teacher directed course, or outsourced their writing, this might be something very interesting to try out! It is sometimes good to get an outside opinion, especially on something that can be subjective, like writing.

Fortuigence also offers some free resources that you might want to check out~

  

End Blank Page Terror ebook: a really great set of graphic organizers that include instructions on when to use them along with how to use them. That's a handy tool to have tucked up your sleeve!

Top Teach: a course for YOU, the teacher, so that you can become your children's "Top Teach" when it comes to writing instruction. This is normally a paid course, but at the time of this review is being offered for free.

Grammar Baseball ebook: by Dr. Ellen Weber ~ offered here for free~ 300+ grammar "trivia" questions and a "Cheat Sheet" for parents, with all the rules needed to play the game.

Not So Nutty Nitty Gritty 

• Company: Fortuigence
• Product: Essay Rock Star Personal Statement Writing Course
• Ages: 12-18 years old 
• Price: $57
• Entire Series is available for $197

Fortuigence can be found online: 

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google+ Lily Iatridis
• Google+ Fortuigence
• Pinterest
• Youtube  

Please click the banner below to visit the TOS Review Crew and see what others had to say about this as well as the other three courses in the Rock Star Series. As always, I hope that this review was useful to you as you choose where best to spend your homeschool budget.

Blessings~

College Common Sense

Oh boy! I have a Sophomore in high school, and college is looming on the horizon. We are in the stages of needing to start figuring out where Eldest wants to go, and how her higher education will be financed. Pretty good timing for my next review item as part of the TOS Review Crew.

I was given 12 months of access to Going to College and Paying for it Online Video and Workbook,  the paid portion of Denise C. Ames' College Common Sense website.



Denise is a Financial Aid Consultant, whose experience has allowed her to collect a vast amount of information, and a system of putting that information to work, on her website.

The meat of her information can be found in the course accessed through membership in the website~ Going to College and Paying For It consists of 6 videos and their accompanying pdf files. This makes the information accessible to both auditory and visual learners, although the videos do contain a few pieces of information not included in the pdfs (however, by and large the pdf's are almost transcripts of the videos). The 6 videos cover the following topics:

• The Big Picture
• How Financial Aid Works
• All About the Free Money
• The System that Works
• You in the Process, and
• Put it all Together

After watching each video, the corresponding pdf file finishes with a page containing a few exercises that will help your and your child to get the beginning of the college journey off the ground

In addition to the pdf files, the website contains many useful links and articles that may provide inspiration for your student's answer to the question "What do I want to do when I grow up?"  (the Going to College piece) as well as help on choosing the right college and how to apply for scholarships and financial aid (the And Paying for It piece).

Prospective students and their parents are also invited to sign up for Denise's monthly newsletter, and to receive her free lesson plans via email.  The newsletters and lesson plans cover some of the same material that you will find in the videos/pdf's, but they are more bits and pieces, not the complete package all at once.

What We Liked~

• The information in the videos was presented with a clear and natural progression, to help the prospective college student approach the decision making and scholarship searching process in a systematic fashion. 
• Everything was broken down into workable exercises and tasks, including ways to look for the right college ( I spent a fair amount of time searching colleges on this site College Navigator which I may not have found without Denise's website pointing me in that direction).
• It created a starting point for those big decisions (Even though we are a couple of years out).
• Helped us to realize that there are many scholarship opportunities
• Showed us places to search scholarships out
• Gave tips on how to approach applying for them in a methodical manner
• Showed us how to keep the process organized.

What We Didn't Like~

• The website is a bit confusing. In order to access the free materials mentioned in the videos and pdf files one must log out of the member portion of the site, and navigate to the appropriate link. It would be helpful if all of the navigation links from the free side of the site remained on the subscription side... we found it rather tedious to log in and out. 
• When using the free lesson plans it is important to know that they don't entirely follow the videos, so be forewarned that there may be some teenage frustration and tears if your child is trying to make them mesh perfectly. They won't, so go into the process knowing that, and everyone will be much happier!

An observation that doesn't really fit into "we didn't like it," but is worth mentioning. 

• The video is not flashy, and often Denise is seen speaking in profile, which can be a little disconcerting if one is used to being spoken "to" directly. 

So how did we actually use this product?

• First, we watched the videos, which gave us a good overview of what to expect. 
• We visted a bunch of the links and started exploring some of the more local college options online.
• We checked out some of the scholarship information, and started thinking about honing that down.
• We are now more motivated to start organizing our search for scholarship monies, and a fairly simple but useful system to use.
• Just reviewing this program opened up conversations again about "What do you want to do when you grow up?" and "What  kind of school do you want to go to?" and "Where do you want to go to school?" We don't have the answers to those questions just yet, but the asking is the first step to finding the answers. :)

What did we decide to save for later?

• Because my eldest is a sophomore, we didn't need to work through the FAFSA form just yet. 
• We didn't tour any colleges (Dragging the boys and the 24/7 "retired service dog" along weren't options at this point in time).
• The scholarship folder is just getting started, so that's a little bit of saved for later and just begun.

Not So Nutty Nitty Gritty 

• Company: College Common Sense
• Product: Going to College and Paying for it Online Video and Workbook
• Ages:Vendor 6+ (yes, there are scholarships available even for 6 year olds), my recommendation is that it is most useful for 9th grade and up
• Price: $25 for 12 months access to the videos, or there is the option to purchase the videos on DVD with an accompanying workbook for $50.

Please click the banner below to visit the TOS Review Crew and see what others had to say. As always, I hope that this review was useful to you as you choose where best to spend your homeschool budget.

Blessings~

Disclaimer: I received this/these item(s)/service for free as part of the TOS Review Crew Program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."

College Prep For Your Genius (?)

Having a student in 9th grade for the first time, PSAT and SAT preparation is now on the scope of my horizon. What to do? How to prepare?  Have they changed much since I took them 20+ years ago? I was interested then, to have the opportunity to review the College Prep Genius course set which came complete with text book, work book and DVD. 

The textbook is split into 6 major sections:

• Introduction to the SAT~ This section includes information on What is the SAT?, What is the PSAT/NMSQT? , How Do I Practice?, and Taking the Real Test. I found a lot of useful information in this section with some generalities (Like don't answer a question you aren't sure about, since unanswered questions don't add or subtract from your score), although it seemed as though there were a lot of things that were mentioned multiple times in various sections. This may have been to emphasize the point, but I know that my daughter gets annoyed with repetition, so the emphasis is more likely to make her tune out. :/  A more streamlined approach would make more sense to me. There were also a few grammatical and/or editing errors that kept popping out at us in this section. That is disappointing in a book that is geared towards creating excellent test-takers.
• Parts 2-4 are the real "Meat" of the program, with advice on how to approach all three sections of the SAT test, with tips, and very useful examples. They incorporate many acronyms to help test-takers to focus on each specific type of question. Although we aren't quite ready to head to the local high school to take any SAT test just yet, I think that incorporating these sections into Eldest's school work-week over the course of the next year(s) could be helpful for when she enters the world of standardized testing.
• Part 5 is geared towards scholarship searches, with tips on applying as well as website resources for finding a variety of scholarships. 
• Part 6 relates to "journaling" your SAT test-taking successes and failures, and using that information to prepare yourself to do a better job the next time you take the test. There are reproducible forms in this section.
• The book ends with an appendix of Vocabulary Words, one of Math Terminology, and a final appendix that is a bit of a personality quiz.

Jean Burk of College Prep Genius recommends that students take the SAT in the 9th and 10th years in preparation for taking the PSAT/NMSQT their Junior year. Acclimating to the testing environment is an idea that makes sense, although I felt the recommendation goes a little too far in suggesting that using the same watch and the same calculator would make some sort of difference.

Jean is also fairly serious about spending hours preparing for the PSAT/NMSQT and the SAT tests in order to qualify for significant scholarships. The recommendation is to spend about 150 hours preparing for the tests. This seems like an outrageous amount of time, but it averages out to about 1 hour per week (There will be some weeks that use less time and others more, realistically). The premise is that if the test score is high enough, the financial gain for the hours invested could be as high as $500/hour, if a full ride scholarship is garnered.

Because we clearly haven't taken any official tests as of yet, I cannot speak to the outcome of using this program. However, there are some specific strategy suggestions that should serve to be beneficial, particularly since we have avoided most standardized testing so far.

The DVD portion of the course is, as might be expected, fairly dry (This is a standardized test-prep course after all... can't get much drier than that). I would recommend the DVD mostly for those who are auditory learners, as the text of the majority of the slides were far too small to be read comfortably. I would also recommend watching the DVD when the student is wide awake, as the Jean Burk's voice had a somewhat soporific effect on me.

The Nitty Gritty~

The College Prep Genius Set components retail separately for $129.85, but the set is offered at a 25% savings at $99.00, and a 30 day, 100% money-back guarantee.

To sum up~ I believe that the College Prep Genius Set is a rather dry but also rather thorough preparation for taking the PSAT/NMSQT and SAT tests. If you have a student who is serious about doing well on those tests, isn't motivated by "Bells and Whistles," and is willing to work steadily through the book, then there is a good chance that they will garner high scores.

Other Crew mates reviewed the Vocabcafe Series of books, so please be sure to stop by the Crew Blog to hear more opinions, and check out the vocab books!

As always, I hope that this review was helpful to you as you search for the best products to use in your homeschool and college preparation.

Blessings~

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this/these item(s)/service for free as part of the TOS Crew Review Program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."

Cerebellum AP Writing: English Language and Comp. Test Prep

Well! Nothing like being prepared well in advance!  :) Towards the end of the school year the TOS Crew received a variety of "Light Speed" AP Exam Prep DVDs. You will want to be sure to check out the rest of the Crew reviews, to see what they thought about the DVDs that they received.
 
I received the Light Speed Writing AP English Language and Composition Exam Preparation DVD. 

Now, keep in mind that I don't have a student of an appropriate age, and when I was in high school I was aware of  the CLEP tests,  (and took) the PSAT and the SAT, but AP courses and tests were not something with which I was familiar.

Having done a little bit of research, I am now a little more prepared for when my children reach the age of AP exams. As I understand it, students can sign up for AP exams (on a yearly basis, in the spring) for courses in which they feel they are adequately prepared.

One benefit of taking the exams appears to be that colleges may look favorably on those who take the exams, as they are an indication that the student is serious about their studies. In addition, if the student scores well on their exams, many, if not most colleges and universities will award the student credit for those scores(I checked Harvard University, and they give credit for certain tests), and/or place them in higher level courses than normal for first year students, which all boils down to saving a little bit of $ on College tuition. There is also the opportunity to qualify for scholarships and/or awards, based on the outcome of the testing. For more AP Exam info, you may find this link helpful.

Now that I've explored a little bit about what AP exams are, let me tell you a little bit about this test prep DVD set that we received.

The DVD is a fast moving video with a variety of engaging and pleasant youths giving tips and pointers to the prospective test-taker. I say fast moving because they take 30 essential topics from the exam and spend a minute on each one. Wow! Talk about cramming!! But I think it is very effective "Cramming", particularly if the DVD is viewed more than once, and a few pieces at a time. Light Speed offers test taking advice (ie: how many minutes to alot for each part of the test, and for each part of the writing process in the composition portion... good stuff!)You can see a sample of the video on the AP Writing product page.

There is an additional CD with a Digital Workbook for extra practice. The workbook reinforces the concepts gone over in the video with an outline and notes on the video, practice questions, games and quizzes. This also increases the effectiveness of the DVD, and while I mentioned "cramming" above, I think it would be reasonable to use the Video and the Digital Workbook as a light "Course" (I wouldn't put it on a transcript... this would be "homework", in my opinion) over a few weeks or even a few months, to prepare for the AP exam.

Cerebellum Corporation and Standard Deviants are offering TOS Crew readers a 20% discount off of ANY product purchased online through the rest of the year with code OSH20 at checkout. Many products (Including the LightSpeed line) are currently on sale for approximately 25% off, AND a code FREE for free shipping on orders over $25 showed up in the checkout area (I tried it, and it appears to stack with the TOS code mentioned above! Excellent!)

This is one of those resources that I didn't know much about, but was very happy to have been exposed to. Again, check out the other TOS Crew reviews, and hopefully this review, coupled with the others will help you to determine where you'd like to spend your homeschool dollars.
Blessings~



Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this/these item(s)/service for free as part of the TOS Crew Review Program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commision's 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."