Most of us have this federal holiday off, but do you know the meaning behind it? According to the United States Department of Labor “Labor Day, the First Monday in September, is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers.”

This day has been observed for more than 100 years, beginning on Tuesday, September 5, 1882 in New York City. The first Monday in September was chosen for the holiday by the Central Labor Union as they urged similar organizations in other cities to follow in their footsteps in celebrating a “workingmen’s holiday”. But this holiday wasn’t passed into legislation, by only 23 states at the time, until 1894 when Congress passed an act making the first Monday in September of each year a legal holiday in the District of Columbia and the territories.

So what does this day mean to you? Yes it is a day off of work where you can enjoy the end of summer, if you’re in cooler climates, or maybe an excuse to lay low and do nothing all day, but maybe this Monday should be about the work you contribute on a daily basis. Whether you’re a student, working professional, in the military, stay-at-home parent, or unemployed, this holiday is to celebrate what you contribute to the country and businesses that surround you.

So whether you’re attending the local parade, or catching up on work, even though that’s missing the point(!) take a moment to remember that because of those that have “labored” before us we have a day to celebrate our daily tasks and hard work.

Happy (early) Labor Day all!

- By J. Mason

Although you may want to sign up for as many classes as possible, taking only one or two in the beginning is the best way to go. That way you’ll be able get a feel for how many hours you need to dedicate to your classes each week. By starting slow, you’ll learn to pace yourself without being overwhelmed as well as what other life commitments will just have to go in order for your online learning experience to be a success.

It’s easier to add additional courses the next semester than it is to drop or fail out of one now. Remember, online college classes are just as challenging and time consuming as the classes at a campus university. It definitely won’t be a walk in the park.

(Source: Education.org)

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Here’s an awesome list of iPhone and iPad apps to help you with your studies! Have you used any of them? Which is your favorite?

Do you recommend any other apps? Please comment and discuss!

Periodic | By JohnsonTech, LLC
$0.99

Periodic is an ad-free and complete reference to the Periodic Table of Elements. It includes useful information such as an element’s atomic weight, electron configuration, melting point, boiling point, atomic radius, ionic radius, and discovery year.

National Geographic World Atlas | By National Geographic Society
$1.99

Easy-to-use, feature packed, and containing the world’s best maps, the National Geographic World Atlas enables you to browse, search, and zoom detailed maps of the globe.

iStudiez Pro | By Andriy Kachalo & Michael Balashoff
$2.99

Unique built-in planner lets you input and easy manage all types of schedules including classic, alternating (A & B weeks), rotating and block schedule.

Not only you can enter most common course details, but also add instructors with all related information such as office hours, affiliation, phone number and email address. As well you are welcome to add holiday periods and even cancel separate classes in case of outstanding events.

In addition, you are supplied with an expanded set of icons designed especially for iStudiez Pro to mark your class types and extracurricular activities. Color labels are available for your convenience to mark each particular course.

Evernote | By Evernote
Free

Evernote turns the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad into an extension of your brain, helping you remember anything and everything that happens in your life. From notes to ideas to snapshots to recordings, put it all into Evernote and watch as it instantly synchronizes from your iPhone to your Mac or Windows desktop.

Cram | By SimpleLeap
$3.99

Studying for an exam is now easy, simple, and fun with Cram. Study with flashcards on your iPhone or iPod Touch and use multiple-choice for practice of the material. When your test is over, Cram grades and records your test performance so you can track your progress.

Convert – the unit calculator | By tap tap tap
$1.99

A fantastic, easy-to-use, and inexpensive conversion tool!

CliffsNotes® | By Modality Inc.
$1.99

Ace your class with the help of CliffsNotes® for Apple handheld devices. The brand you trust for fast, effective, and comprehensive literature review has been reinvented for the small screen to give you anywhere, anytime access to character, theme and plot summaries and analysis; interactive quiz features; and audio CramCasts covering the great works of literature.

Margins | By Architechies
$3.99

Margins keeps your notes organized by book and page number. Each note can contain a quote and a comment, so you know exactly what caught your attention and precisely what you thought about it. You can even search for keywords in your notes. Try doing that with paper!

Margins keeps bibliographic information right beside your notes, and if your book has an ISBN it can even look it all up for you. And since it’s all stored on your iPhone or iPod touch—a device you probably keep with you all the time—you’ll never leave your notes on your desk or in the library.

Bento | By FileMaker, Inc.
$4.99

Manage contacts and club members, coordinate projects and parties – even track vet bills and vehicle maintenance in one, easy-to-use application. Bento® for iPhone is the portable version of the popular personal database from FileMaker® that’s as easy to use as your iPhone or iPad!

YouNote Lite | By Sophiacom
Free

YouNote allows you to take quick notes on all sorts of information. This information is accessible at all times.

With YouNote, you can take different types of notes like AudioNote, PictNote, DrawNote, TextNot, WebNote and MultiNote.

Does remaining silent during an interrogation actually invoke one’s right to remain silent?  In a landmark case, two police officers interrogated a criminal suspect, Van Chester Thompkins, who refused to acknowledge whether or not he invoked his Miranda rights during his interrogation by staying completely silent. What techniques did the police officers utilize in their interrogation, and how did their methods hold up in court?

Join American Military University for this live webcast that will explore the Berghuis v. Thompkins case on Miranda warnings and the resulting legal ramifications that unfolded. 

Examining the Berghuis v. Thompkins case on the right to remain silent
Wednesday, September 8, 2010 – 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. ET

In this comprehensive case study that touches upon legal analysis and criminal justice, our speakers will address:

• Miranda warnings
• How Berghuis v. Thompkins developed
• Police interrogation techniques
• The case’s effect on police interrogations and the legal system

Attend this special LIVE webcast event for more information on better understanding your Miranda rights.

- By J. Mason

Screenshot of iPad and Flipboard App, Credit: iTunes/Apple/Flipboard

For iPad lovers out there, here’s a great new tool to share your interests with those that follow you (and presumably the world).  It’s called “Flipboard“.

It’s a downloadable app for the iPad.  Here’s the excerpt from their iTunes store page:

Flipboard is the world’s first social magazine. Your Flipboard is a fast, beautiful way to flip through news, photos and updates your friends are sharing on Facebook and Twitter. And it’s an incredible place to discover fresh content from around the Twittersphere.

Flipboard brings the timeless layout of print media to social media. No more scrolling through long lists of posts and links. No more jumping back and forth between websites. Your Flipboard is everything you care about in one place. It’s your magazine. It’s your Flipboard.

Essentially, Flipboard takes all the links you are sharing and makes them far more visually appealing, and then assembles them as a ‘digital’ magazine, making it much more interactive (and fun) to browse through all the news, links, photos, articles and other digital ‘stuff’ you (or someone you follow) shares.

If you’ve been putting off a huge end-of-semester assignment because you don’t know where you’ll find the time to fit it in your busy schedule, it helps to start small. Begin working for just ten minutes on the daunting task. Almost any task,  no matter how unpleasant, or anxiety provoking, can be tolerated for a short amount of time.

When you are having difficulty sitting down to work, set yourself the small but significant goal of working for just ten minutes on the project. After you’ve fulfilled that promise to yourself, you are free to either continue working or to stop.

Further Tips for the Tolerable Ten

1. If you haven’t been working at all, start by doing anything and stop after ten minutes. In other words, the less you’ve been doing the lower your expectations should be at first. If you put in your ten minutes, and you have succeeded. One of the main benefits of the tolerable ten is to start rebuilding your trust in yourself.
2. If you have been working fairly consistently, try using the tolerable ten for the hardest tasks, whether starting a section of rough draft writing, or contacting the advisor you’ve been avoiding.
3. Even on a day that is full of duties unrelated to your main academic goal, try to squeeze in a tolerable ten. Before you go to bed at night, check whether you’ve logged in ten, if not, do it then. A commitment to consistency will keep your conscious and unconscious mind connected with your project.
4. Reward yourself, at least mentally, for completing your daily ten. Focus on process rather than product. It is not whether the words you’ve just written were brilliant, it is that you sat down and did what you said you would do. Small, concrete rewards are ideal: ten minutes with the newspaper, a phone call to a friend, a relaxing bath, a scoop of ice cream, wearing your favorite shirt, a cup of cappuccino.
5. Precede time-sapping activities (such responding to email) with a tolerable ten.

(source: Successful Academic)

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For the bookworms and wordsmiths out there I wanted to share a great site I recently found, www.readprint.com. The purpose of this site is to offer over 8,000 free online versions of books (fiction and non-fiction), essays, plays, poetry, and short stories. So you can read to your heart’s content, without having to go out to the bookstore and buy the book.

Once you get to Read Print you’ll notice 4 major search options to choose from; Online Books, Authors, Quotes, and Volunteer. Online Books will show you the more popular books accessed as well as top authors to narrow down your search. Authors just allows you to search by author. Quotes is a neat section where you can look up famous lines from great writers, and volunteer is all about sharing the word of the great benefits of Read Print to people you know.

Other cool things to consider with this site, they have a reading mode! Though still seemingly in its beta stage of development it does the trick. Once you’ve found the book/novel you want to read you can click on “reading mode” and the rest of the site is blacked out so all you see is the text from what you’re reading. It tries eliminating distractions on what would normally deter you from getting through the first page of words online. 

You don’t have to sign up to take advantage of the perks of reading volumes of great novels for free. This site is very social too; allowing you to share the page or book you’re reading with followers and friends.

- By J. Mason

Next time you’re shopping for textbooks and you find yourself in a traditional bookstore (or really anywhere), you can use your iPhone to find used books on the website, www.Half.com.  It’s a simple iPhone app that scans the bar code (or takes other info such as title or author) of the book and checks the Half.com website to see if anyone is offering that book. There’s also an app by CampusBooks.com which searches multiple sites for the best buy and sell prices for a specific book.  Both these apps can save you some serious cash.

Learn more about the Half.com App

Learn more about the CampusBooks.com App

Of course, if you are an undergraduate degree-seeking student at my school, American Public University, your eligible for a book grant which provides books at no cost… so that’s hard to beat, even with the latest iPad app!

Being — or becoming — a good writer isn’t just important for school assignments or a career in journalism. Writing is a critical skill for virtually any profession, and even experienced writers know they can always improve their work. It’s a quest that should never end, because the more you write, the better your writing can become.

1. Make sure your sentences are clear and statements accurate. Could your professor or boss misunderstand your words, or miss your point? Are you certain your facts and resources are correct? If you include hyperlinks in electronic documents, did you check to assure they work?
2. Read what you’ve written. Read it again. Ask someone else to read it. Could you have improved anything? Are there errors in sentence structure, grammar or spelling? Team up with another student or colleague to do regular constructive critiques of your work. It’s a great way for each of you to continually improve your writing skills.
3. Whether you’ve always loved words, or hated to look them up, online dictionaries and thesauri make using the right words simpler, easier and more precise.
4. Class work may require detailed annotations and footnotes. Business correspondence should illustrate your message concisely, especially when preparing presentations. Short sentences and paragraphs are best for online, where readers tend to scan the information.
5. Take a newswriting course. It will teach you how to quickly and succinctly communicate information and how the inverted pyramid can grab your reader’s attention more quickly.  If newswriting isn’t offered at your school, study it on your own using other resources.
6. Don’t use jargon. Keep acronyms to a minimum and consider whether you really need to use one at all. Are there too many prepositional phrases, generally rife with commas? Write for clarity and understanding — don’t make your reader guess.
7. Do a comma search. Commas stop the reader, which is what you generally intend them to do. But overuse can result in long sentences that are hard to read and understand. Look at your sentence again. Should you break it into two?
8. Search again – for repetitive words and phrases that aren’t necessary. Sometimes, however, a particular word might be the best — or only — way to communicate clearly and accurately. And sometimes repetition is used for alliteration or to make a certain point.
9. Make it interesting. No matter what you write — from business letters to speeches, from research papers to marketing brochures — it should be compelling. Create a mesmerizing lead sentence or statement. Use examples and anecdotes — adapting these to the reader’s business or industry, if possible.

10. No idioms or clichés, for Pete’s sake! Hunt them down and kill them. But beware: clichés are sneaky — in fact, this sentence is starting to sound cliché-like. While it’s fun to discover the origins of slang, idioms and clichés, set a higher standard for your writing. What do you really want to convey? Using clichés is less accurate, and your work will appear unpolished and unsophisticated.

- By Online Learning Tips Staff

Successful online students develop the skill to converse with their instructor. They learn to ask their instructors questions and answering questions posed by instructors. Instructors ask questions to cause critical thinking to occur in their students in order to help them develop a better understanding of course materials and resources. It is necessary to avoid the view that these questions are busy work.

The ability to create thought provoking questions are essential to success. These types of questions lead to a deeper understanding, along with gaining new knowledge about the material being questioned. Communication through questioning is an important skill to learn.

(source: suite101.com)

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