Posts filed in education

College Students

eNotes Student of Change: Amena Mian, and the Fashionably Conscious NGO

“I dreamt up Project Sina in college and always thought that I would pursue the endeavor later on in my career. I guess there is a perception that one has to be of a certain age and have collected a number of accolades before doing something entrepreneurial… Frustrated by a narrow job market, I was compelled to create my own opportunities regardless of who or what entity deemed me qualified.” — Amena Mian

In our new blog series, we’re interviewing students and recent graduates who have taken their studies and done something profound with them. Some are doing great work at home, while others have traveled to far off destinations to help communities in need. Whatever path they’ve chosen, these inspirational Students of Change prove that being young and recently graduated are never hindrances to doing what you want to do.

amenaAmena Mian is a graduate of UC Davis, with a degree in Global Community Development. She has an extensive amount of experience working for mission-driven nonprofits both in the US and South Asia and she was selected as a Fellow for the IDEX Fellowship in Social Enterpise ’12-’13. Her non-profit fashion label Project Sina is “generating opportunity for women through a stitch,” employing Pakistani artisans to create beautiful, hand-crafted clothing and repaying them with fair wages and education. 

Amena’s efforts to promote literacy and equality for South Asian women make her our hero and this week’s Student of Change. Read on to learn more about her and her co-founders’ noble cause!

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College Students

eNotes Student of Change: Emily Thomas, The Social Media Do-Gooder

“At 24 years old having 61,000 followers on Twitter, people always ask me if there’s something profound I did to make that happen and my answer is always no. I just showed people that I cared.” – Emily Thomas

In our new blog series, we’re interviewing students and recent graduates who have taken their studies and done something profound with them. Some are doing great work at home, while others have traveled to far off destinations to help communities in need. Whatever path they’ve chosen, these inspirational Students of Change prove that being young and recently graduated are never hindrances to doing what you want to do.

Take the subject of our first interview for example, Emily Thomas. Emily is 24 and just recently graduated from Seattle University. Her writing has been featured on Huffington Post and she’s currently involved with a number of PR projects, the biggest of which is #standwithme, a campaign for a documentary about the issue of child slavery. She’s a social media guru with upwards of 61,000 followers on Twitter. We at eNotes believe that she exemplifies the ideal eNoter through her upbeat attitude and never ending quest for knowledge. Read on for your daily dose of inspiration.

You’re a self-proclaimed do-gooder, what does this mean to you and what led you to aspire to this identity?

standwithme1I got the phrase “do-gooder” from one of my favorite quotes by Minor Myers which is “go into the world and do well, but more importantly, go into the world and do good.” While being an established writer and successful social media strategist is important to me, I always remind myself that true success comes from two things: doing something that makes you happy and doing something that makes the world a better place than when you found it. The truth is that we aren’t going to live forever, but we have the ability to forever make the world a better place by choosing our actions wisely.

Before I embark on any social media campaigns, I ask myself if it’s a project that I feel is going to make a difference in the world. What I have found from working on projects like #standwithme and Snap2Live is that my ability to use social media strategy helps companies tell their story in the best way possible through cyber space. I know that my efforts with these two projects are affecting more lives than just my own. Continue Reading ›

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Books

Calling all teachers: check out our new eNotes lesson plans!

Here at eNotes, we publish new lesson plans and response journals for teachers all the time. Check out our latest additions below! And remember, these items are free for download with your subscription to the eNotes Teacher’s Edition. 

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jane eyreNew Lesson Plans:

(eNotes lesson plans have been written, tested, and approved by working classroom teachers. The main components of each plan include an in-depth introductory lecture, discussion questions, vocabulary lists, chapter-based questions, essay prompts and a multiple-choice test. They also offer complete answer keys for the instructor.)

Jane Eyre (174 pages)

Things Fall Apart (85 pages)

Death of a Salesman (47 pages)

New Response Journals:

(An eNotes Response Journal is designed to encourage your students to read and write more effectively and with more pleasure. Each Response Journal includes a rich variety of writing prompts: some will take students directly into the text, while others will give students an opportunity to express their thoughts and feelings and to reflect on their own experiences.)

The Hunger Games (26 pages)

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (20 pages)

About our special Teacher’s Edition:

The eNotes Teacher’s Edition currently offers 105 lesson plans, with 3 new plans added each month. Your subscription guarantees you an unlimited number of downloads of these plans and response journals, plus other classroom resources like user-uploaded documents, daily Q&A, and thousands of study guides. For more information on the Teacher’s Edition or a free sample of one of our lesson plans, click here.

Are you a teacher? eNotes employs real instructors as Educators in our Homework Help program for students. Submit your application today and join our team of experts!

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Education

Your New Textbook, Brought to You by Bill Gates

Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold have filed a new patent that could change the way we read textbooks, and possibly the way we learn, forever.

textbook patentBored of reading the same textbooks, the same old way? Well, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold, the duo behind an invention that can actually slow hurricanes, are looking to change that. In 2012 they filed a patent for a device that will have the capability to “automatically create a customized video snippet from any random selection of text,” according to GeekWire. That means that as you read a textbook on, say, a tablet or your phone, that device could generate a video based on the content of the textbook–turning a boring old piece of text into essentially a short film.

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Education

Get Free Homework Help with eNotes on Twitter

Don’t just ask for Homework Help, tweet it!

Twitter has changed the landscape of so many things–from literature, to politics, to education. That’s why we at eNotes couldn’t resist jumping into the Twitter pool to bring you the homework help you need in a new and exciting way. Introducing operation #swag!

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Selfie courtesy of our loyal intern and resident mathematics genius, Dan.

Whether you write to us @enotes or simply vent to the Twittersphere (see above) we’re here to give you the help you need. Simply post your question in a tweet and we’ll post it for you on eNotes to be answered by our expert educators–a team of real teachers and professors.

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College Students

What the $$$$ Just Happened to My Student Loans?!!

Paying for college is tough enough, but have you heard about the recent hikes in interest rates for student loans? Read on to find out how this affects you as either a current student or someone in repayment, plus how government officials plan to resolve the issue of crippling student debt.

As of yesterday, Stafford Loan interest rates doubled from 3.4% to 6.8%. Congress did not pass an alternative measure before the July 4th break, which will end at 2:00pm on Monday, July 8th. However, it still has the option to pass a measure that will retroactively affect the rise in interest rates, altering the Stafford Loan rates for this year’s students and perhaps others. This article will outline a few of the options Congress faces, what changes may be made, and how those changes might affect students with Stafford Loans.

Student Loans Crippling Many

Protestors advocate against increased interest rates.

What is a Stafford Loan and how does it work?

Stafford Loans are the most common kind of federal student loans available. They are available to students at accredited institutions

in the United States, a category to which most colleges and universities in the United States pertain. Stafford Loans can be either subsidized or unsubsidized. Of these, subsidized loans tend to have lower interest rates, and the federal government pays the interest that the loans accrue. Contrastingly, the interest that accumulates on unsubsidized Stafford Loans is capitalized, meaning that it is added to the part of the loan on which interest is paid.

Subsidized Stafford Loans are available to those who demonstrate financial need via the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form, which must be renewed each year a student wishes to apply. Unsubsidized Stafford Loans are available to all students who meet the Stafford Loan requirements, which can be found here.

In addition to Stafford Loans, the government gives out PLUS Loans, which are unsubsidized loans and in the past have had higher interest rates than Stafford Loans. PLUS Loans are available to graduate students and parents of students.

The Option Proposed by President Obama:

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Education

Social Media and the Classroom: How to Use Vine

Social media is already transforming classrooms. If you teach, there’s a good chance you’ve used Twitter, Facebook, and even Pinterest to draw your students’ attention to their work in exciting new ways. But now there’s a new app on the scene: Vine. Luckily the blog at OnlineUniversities.com was on hand to help us all become a little more familiar with this new social forum and figure out how to implement it in our ever evolving classrooms. Take a look and let us know what you think!

What is Vine?

Vine, a mobile app created by Twitter, allows users to create and share short video clips. Like Twitter, brevity is valued and video clips can’t exceed six seconds in length, so users have to be quick about getting their point across. Vine is a pretty new addition to the social media canon. The service was founded in June of 2012, but just launched to the public in January of 2013 as a free app on the iPhone and iPod Touch. In this time, Vine has seen amazing growth, with users tweeting an average of 2,300 Vine videos every hour. Below is an example of the creativity one can bring to the app.

Why Vine is Special

Just like Twitter, Vine imposes limitations on how much content users can generate. While this might seem constricting at first, if Twitter has proven anything it’s that it’s easy to say a lot with very little. Limitations, in this way, aren’t always a bad thing. In fact, the constraints may actually force users to get to the point more quickly and to be more creative and innovative about how they present their content.

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