As teachers and counselors, you know that the elementary school years are important. During the elementary school years, your students build visions of what they desire to do in their lives as they contribute to the workforce. With your help, your students remain open to new career ideas and possibilities. As you work with your students, your students do not make premature career choices or career preparations. For your students, elementary school is a time to build awareness.
As elementary school teachers and counselors, you use career education to promote self-worth, skill development, and decision making strategies. Your activities are designed to build self, family, school, community, and career awareness. You use age-appropriate materials that match your students’ developmental levels. These activities expose your students to a variety of different jobs, career information sources, and the reasons why people work.
When you prepare to develop age-appropriate materials products, tests and tools, you use career models like the National Career Development Guidelines (NCDG). The National Career Development Guidelines (NCDG) have domains, goals, and indicators. Each domain represents a developmental area. Under each domain, there are goals or competencies. For each goal, indicators highlight the knowledge and skills needed to achieve the goal. The National Career Development Guidelines (NCDG) prepares you to make materials that are suitable for your students.
As a elementary school counselors and teachers, you create individual career plans and portfolios. Individual career plans (ICP) -
Develop self-awareness Identify initial career goals and educational plans Increase employability and decision making skills
Individual career portfolios summarize career awareness activities and experiences that occur during the school year. In addition to individual career plans and portfolios, you use a variety of resources –
By: Mary Askew
Archive for October, 2009
Elementary School Teachers, Counselors, and Career Education
October 23rd, 2009Education – The Ultimate Self Improvement Strategy
October 22nd, 2009
Education is the Key
Education:
the act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life.
A prerequisite to self improvement is making a commitment to life long learning, you must be a student of life. Education is the key that unlocks the doors of endless opportunities. When we think of education we often think of schools or college. A formal or conventional education is one way of acquiring knowledge… but learning should not simply begin or end there.
There are thousands of people walking around with degrees, certificates, and diplomas that are clueless. This is not to say that there is anything wrong with a formal education, the point is true education is obtained by those with a passion for learning and growing.
Every day represents a new lesson. To experience life abundantly we must strive to learn something new every day.
How do we learn something new every day?
Look at your life and your daily experiences…the good, the bad, and the ugly. There is a learning opportunity in every situation and/or event that occurs in our lives. Living life abundantly means being proactive in improving your life… this means being self motivated, self determined, self disciplined, and oftentimes self taught.
“None of the world’s problems will have a solution until the world’s individuals become thoroughly self-educated.” – Richard Buckminster
“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” -Alvin Toffler
“Only the educated are free.” – Epictetus
“The person with the widest variety of knowledge and skill in any area will have the most luck in that area. Expanded knowledge and skill intensify awareness and expand opportunity.” -Brian Tracy
By: Marenda Hughes Taylor
Free Nursing Continuing Education
October 21st, 2009
There are many organizations that offer accredited, Free Continuing Education courses through their websites. These are mostly demo or pre-registration versions. Registration in these sites is free. Once the aspirant registers, the website sends the password by email. This password can be used to access all info, such as the list of courses available, cost and number of hours allotted for each course, and FAQs.
For instance, http://www.nursingmatters.com hosts one pre-registration, free course every month. For November it is a 1-hour course on `Pediatric Psychopharmacology’.
The range of programs offered by these sites is astoundingly broad and include topics such as the following: Age-Specific Considerations in Patient Care, An Overview of Alzheimer’s Disease, Breastfeeding: The Basics, ECG Interpretation: Learning the Basics, Ecstasy: Under the Influence, Latex Allergy: More Than Skin Deep, Perspectives on Childhood Poisoning, Performance Improvement: A Change for the Better, and What’s up at the Joint? New Tracer Methodology. While most courses are of 1 or 2 hours’ duration, some may go up to 8 hours or more depending upon the topic concerned.
Many of these courses use multimedia and communicational platforms such as interactivity, voicemail, video conferencing and more. They also incorporate highly interactive seminars and assessment sessions. At the end of any course, the end user can take an assessment test and get his performance evaluated instantly. All these can be done at any time that is convenient to the end user.
Several Continuing Education organizations offer free courses to nurses, particularly in times of human need. One such course is `Hurricane Katrina: Preventing Infectious Diseases’, a 1.5-hour course offered by Wild Iris Medical Education, as advertised in their website http://www.nursingceu.com. Such courses can be a boon to the community.
By: Richard Romando
