Every year, aspiring college students and high school graduates spend hours searching for scholarships and grants to help them pay for college, and after sorting through hundreds to find the few they actually qualify for, they have to apply for them.  The application process is certainly much easier than the fielding process, but it can also be the most dangerous time of all.  Mistakes made on those applications can cost time — and, if they are really badly done, money.

Here are some of the most common mistakes made on applications for college grants and scholarships.  Knowing what these are can help you to avoid the same mistakes others have made and will give you a much better chance of scoring that funding for your college education.  You’ll want to share and bookmark this.  These are the top five mistakes that can rob you of the chance to land the scholarship or scholarships you most need:

Just what are some popular herbs for health and well-being? There are many to choose from. There are some with amazing properties that rival today’s modern medicines.

These situations should prohibit you from taking herbs though. If you are pregnant, breastfeeding, taking any other medicines like prescription, herbal, or over the counter, or have a major health condition like kidney disease, asthma, or HIV/AIDS. If you don’t have any of those conditions, then you are good to go. Just read up carefully on all the requirements regarding different herbs’ uses.

Agrimony is a good herb for indigestion. It can help with diarrhea and other intestinal problems like appendicitis too. The herb actually makes your digestive juices speed up. It helps your liver secrete more, it promotes food being assimilated, and it helps prevents diabetes from forming, and it acts as an excellent blood cleanser. Agrimony is also good for the throat and mouth flaring up, getting bad tonsillitis, having throat problems, and going through oral thrush or inflammation of the mucus membranes inside the mouth. It is a great herb for singers and actors because they can just gargle it around in their mouth before a big concert to help them get prepared.

Aloe Vera is another very good herb. Alexander the Great actually fought a war over it. It is great for scratches, scrapes, and burns. The top reason to use it is because it works just as well as over-the-counter topical creams. You can just keep a plant growing in your house and take off a leaf whenever you get an irritation. It also good to rub on your skin after a sunburn. This is a topical herb. There are many herbs out there, but some are built for internal use and some are built for external use.

Another good herb is rosemary. Rosemary can be used as a healing herb of the mind. Rosemary oil has long been used to help the mind and facilitate positive thoughts. There are a lot of herbs that are drilled down to their essence in the form of essential oils.

Online education and traditional education have been a seemingly unintentional collaborative endeavor of late, and today’s announcement by Apple, Inc., of it’s new iBooks 2 textbook service will serve to blur the lines between tradition and innovation even more.  iBooks 2 promises to deliver movies, links, multitouch gestures, faster than light searches, photo galleries, visual quiz sections, and 3-D models among other interactive elements to textbooks.  Available for download starting today, iBooks 2 is a free app. So, what about the textbooks themselves?  Where will they come from?

“That’s where Apple’s new textbook authoring software comes into play,” said one tech expert and journalist.  ”This free Mac app for authoring books will be made available as iBooks Author.  iBooks Author will contain several templates, drag-and-drop controls, auto-formatting and the ability to introduce custom elements as well.”

That’s great for people who plan on writing textbooks, but what about textbooks already being used in elementary schools, colleges, and universities?  Not to worry. Apple’s got plenty of partners lined up that will allow them to offer textbooks for an incredible $14.99 or less. In fact, the three major textbook publishers who have already signed on are Pearson, McGraw-Hill, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and these are the very same companies who currently produce 90 percent of the textbooks used in classrooms today.  This will amount to phenomenal savings for school districts, college students, and others with a vested interest in the textbook industry.  This is revolutionary, in every sense of the word.  Steve Jobs would have been proud today.

Despite all of this, Apple still wants to do even more for education. Today, the company also released a whole new iTunes U, which was formerly a loose collection of educational podcasts and videos that could be accessed through iTunes software only. This new, evolved iteration of iTunes U comes in the form of an app, and according to a spokesman from Apple,  ”lets teachers do everything on their iPad.”  This seems to be a giant step into the future of textbooks, and of classrooms and education itself.  This is the 21st century education model come to life.  It is what many envisioned 30 years ago when imagining the educational environments of the future, and then some. The new app will allow instructors to customize their topics, post memos and office hours, and enable lectures to be downloaded, or to stream to devices.  This could go a long way towards making distance education and brick and mortar classrooms more similar in all the ways that are most important.

Last week, the esteemed Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced plans for free online courses that will allow participants in the program to earn official certifications from MIT.  While the courses themselves will be free, heralding what is likely to become a historic step forward for the open education movement, the certificate at the end of the course of study will be available to students for a “modest fee.”  In an open and free society, many people have begun to adopt libertarian attitudes towards the availability of knowledge and information.  Such information should be free to anyone who wishes to learn it, and there should be some recognition given for the successful completion of independent studies.  The same can recently be said for our society’s increasing intolerance of draconian legislation such as SOPA (or, the Stop Online Piracy Act) scheduled for debate in the House early next year.  Although these two fields are starkly different — education, and digital ownership of copyrighted materials and media — the fundamental change in the attitudes of free people regarding both matters is evident in each forum.

The step by MIT has been lauded as a noble advance in Western thought on the evolution of formal higher education.  The way even young children learn has been altered by the presence of technology in nearly every aspect of human life, and the same is true of college age students and older, non traditional students as well.  It is now a fair expectation that, with the abundance of freely available books and knowledge found on an uncensored Internet, people will be able to further their education and value to society with far less dependence on institutional structures.  It brings to mind idealistic visions of what life was once like during the pinnacle of ancient Greek society — but unlike then, now, the same educational opportunities are extended to all citizens rather than only to free men.

What do you think of MIT’s bold move to make education more open to ordinary people?  Let us hear from you.

The Peace Corps, an American volunteer program run by the United States Government, has three primary goals: providing technical assistance, helping people outside the United States to understand US culture, and helping Americans to understand the cultures of other countries. The kind of work they do is carried out by volunteers who are deployed to foreign countries for a period of time, usually limited to five years but often much shorter.

Each Peace Corps Volunteer must be an American citizen, and typically has an undergraduate college degree.  It can be a prestigious addition to one’s resume to have served in the Peace Corps, and some people even consider it an alternative to a master’s degree in terms of how valuable it can be for volunteers in landing high paying jobs upon their return to the United States. ADT home security is one of the expenses most people will think is important once they enter the work force, and having the right job can help make that possible.  Here is a video about the Peace Corps.

Many people often ponder the idea of going back to school to get their masters degree so that they can improve their career.  Unfortunately it usually does not get any farther than pondering though because the thoughts of how much work and effort that will have to go into earning a degree can seem more than overwhelming.  The cost is another factor that can scare people from moving on in their education and career.  

After much thought and deliberation for my own career and education I decided that I would go back to school for my masters in leadership.  I knew that if I wanted to forward my career that I would have to do it.  What I did not realize was how advantageous it really was for me to finish my masters.  It can be for you too.  Take a look at some of the ways that getting my masters helped me in my career, and they can probably help you also.

• New Connections. When you are attaining your masters degree, then you are often in close contact with other professionals like yourself in the same industry.  This contact will form into relationships that can potentially be of great value to you further down the road.
• More Knowledge.  Obviously you will be learning will you are getting your masters, but you can acquire even more knowledge from your experienced class instructors.  Your instructors have likely been in the industry you are in for some time and they can share some much need enlightenment and advice for you even after the class is over.
• More Job Opportunity.  This does not necessarily mean that a masters degree will mean you have to move on to a different company to find more opportunity.  This means that within your current company you can use your masters as a way to move up.  Apply your class projects in a real world approach at your company and you’ll find that you achieve some amazing things.

If children are truly the world’s most valuable resource, then teachers are non-expendable assets to every country around the globe since the future of the world’s children relies on how well we educate them.  The recent education crisis in America involving devastating budget cuts for school districts in every state, a reduction of federal funding support, and no relenting of the failed No Child Left Behind legislation and educational reforms that have done nothing to reform education, and much to destroy it. During the 2008 presidential election, the largest political lobby in the United States, the NEA (National Educators Association) threw its substantial weight behind the dark horse candidate Obama, who they believed would repeal much of NCLB and restore order and sanity to public education.  Obama made many promises and assurances to that effect, yet has failed to do anything to reform education or to improve the lots of states facing financial cutbacks that undermine years of effort, setting them back 30 years in progress on all fronts.

Teachers are valuable, but let’s take a look at how much they are worth in each country.  Here is an infographic you will find helpful. Click to expand:

Are you one of the thousands of public school teachers laid off across the nation as unprecedented budget cuts plague our nation’s school districts?  Then this final week of summer vacation marks the beginning of some very uncertain times for you and your career.  You have some unfortunate choices to make:  do you wait around and hope the school districts are able to recover some of their lost funding, or do you hastily start applying for other jobs, perhaps quite a few steps off your chosen career path? Your answer to this question depends on a variety of factors such as the availability of similar employment within reasonable commuting distance, how much responsibility you personally bear for the day to day bills your household must pay each month, and whether you can wait until things calm down before you launch into a full blown career makeover you don’t feel ready for.

If you do decide to stick things out in education, but there are no jobs available for you in traditional schools, you have a few options:

1.  Investigate private, religious, and charter schools in your area.  This would keep you working in your chosen profession while you wait for sanity (and funding) to return to the local public school districts.  You can still earn CEUs to maintain your professional state license throughout your time working at a school like this, but you might not earn as much salary.

2.  Consider going in with some laid off friends or former colleagues and starting your own pre-school or licensed day school.

3.  Investigate the many new and exciting careers for educators in distance learning environments, where the interaction is all online.

In most of these situations, there is the real possibility that a professional educator could keep working in his or her field, with as few compromises as possible.  The online option is probably the best bet though.  Online education opportunities are booming, and the need for instructors of primary and post-secondary curriculum with experience in distance education is projected to continue its upward trend through the next decade.  Gaining online teaching experience can do nothing but help your career right now, so looking into that would not at all be a bad idea.

Have you ever burned the midnight oil on the night before a large research paper was due, a difficult quiz was to be given, or an exam was coming up first thing in the morning? Maybe, since you were taking an online class for your higher education, you assumed it was going to be a lot easier than a real life class. Or perhaps you just procrastinated too much and completely lost your sense of equilibrium, and now you’re facing those dire moments where you’ve run out of time and the assignment is due within hours. Whatever your case may be, even an online education does not make you immune to the need for the occasional study aid.

Some students turn to excessive amounts of caffeine, but before you run out to Starbucks and blow your allowance on late night espresso lattes, you might be surprised at what some of your non-online student counterparts are doing to get their work done on time. Unless you have had your head in the sand for the past few years, you’re bound to have heard of the herbal concoctions that are designed to provide the same kind of feeling one might experience from marijuana smoking. In many states, and in the UK and the rest of Europe, the recently popular version of this herbal cannabis replacement called k2 is now outlawed.  But it is only a very limited combination of five ingredients that have been banned, and hundreds more cannabinoids are invented on a daily basis, so they are not illegal unless specifically outlawed, which they have not been.  Examples of products currently popular among these users can be found as bulk herbal incense and other names similar to that one.

The problem with these is that they are legal, but most likely not very safe.  Most of these colorful and fragrant packets of synthetic marijuana are laced with other chemicals and ingredients which may be far more dangerous for human consumption via inhalation than anyone realizes.  Some users have suffered massive panic attacks and hallucinations using these products, and others have had to be hospitalized for racing hearts and other issues.  Sometimes, people driving erratically under the influence of these compounds have automobile accidents, or are the causes of hit and run crimes.

So, stay away from junk like that when studying online.  Instead, get lots of sleep, eat right, and plan ahead.

It’s only the end of June, but before you know it, high school graduates and returning college students will all be clamoring for back to school bargains as they get ready to pack up and move onto campuses across the United States.  They are the “traditional” students, who will be moving away to school, living on or near campus, and are in need of a dorm fridge, hotplate, and coffee maker for the apartment or dorm room.  Not to mention a small television, a laptop or other computer, special sized bedding, towels, toiletries, maybe a few new outfits, and a car (if the student doesn’t already have one.)  Costs for outfitting a college student for a move to a faraway campus can quickly soar out of control.  They are costs in addition to the ordinary room and board, and tuition payments due to the school.

When in an online learning environment, the expenses are far less, but they are still there.  If attending a traditional campus college, you could perhaps get by with an old clunker of a used laptop for a while.  After all, there are computer labs on the grounds that you can use if you really need to.  But at home, where your “campus” would be as an online student, the only computer you are likely to have is the one that you own or buy just for the purpose of completing assignments for online classes and staying in touch as per course requirements, via email and scheduled message board postings.  If your only technology is what you have at home, it needs to be top notch, and in excellent condition.  You will also need to think about external storage devices for backup, or a comprehensive cloud storage solution. Keep in mind with the purchase of expensive educational equipment, it’s important to protect your investments with ADT Home Security.

One more big way you will probably save money by attending an online degree program includes transportation costs.  Unless you already live across the street from a college or university, you’re going to have to commute to get to your campus (even to move there the first time) and you’ll have to have a way to get around the college town once you’re there.  If you attend a school that allows students to have their own cars the first year, plan on budgeting for gas.  If you take your classes online, however, all you’ll need is enough OJ to keep you clicking through your day.

Those are some things to think about when planning for online college expenses.  Getting an education online can definitely save you some money.