How to Use Social Media to Pay for College
Get Schooled appears on Fox News Live to talk about My College Dollars, a Facebook app that let’s you search for scholarships through Facebook!
Bella Thorne Drops in at Mary McLeod Bethune and Harlem Shakes!
Bella Thorne, star of Disney Channel’s “Shake It Up,” joined the Get Schooled Celebrity Victory Tour to recognize students with outstanding attendance! Bella visited Mary McLeod Bethune Middle School in Los Angeles, California to help celebrate their 2.5% attendance increase. As “celebrity principal for the day,” she pumped up the students over the loud speaker and hosted an assembly, which even included The Harlem Shake!
Beyond the Bubble: Schools Get Ready for Common Core Assessments
Are you concerned about Common Core Standards? This blog post addresses many of your concerns and offers glimmers of hope!
Jessica Keigan, a teacher at Horizon High School in Thornton, Colorado, knows there will be big changes in the way she and her colleagues teach reading and math. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and all they bring—more rigorous content, new training, and new student assessments—are being rolled out across the country, creating an understandably high level of anticipation and anxiety. But Keigan, who is in her 10th year as an English teacher, is a self-described “optimist.”
Graduating from high school will help you achieve your goals! When you promise to graduate, you are taking the first step towards reaching your dreams. But that’s not all … as a little extra incentive, the Taco Bell Foundation for Teens is giving away SONY® PlayStation Vitas to teens who make the Graduate for Más Promise from March 6 through April 10. Make the promise to graduate high school and YOU could win the #Grad4Mas Giveaway!
Here’s how to participate:
1. Make the promise to graduate on GraduateforMás.com
2. Tweet about your promise using the hashtag #GRAD4MÁS!
If you’ve already made the promise, tweet about it to your friends using #GRAD4MAS and you’ll be entered! Make sure to follow @TacoBell4Teens on Twitter - every Thursday, they will announce the winners on Twitter. Respond within three days to claim your prize!
What are you waiting for? Make the promise TODAY on GraduateforMás.com and we bet you’ll look great in that cap and gown!
How Texting Can Keep Teens on Track to College
At Get Schooled, we prefer to be leaders in digital innovation when it comes to keeping students engaged in their educations and on track for graduation and college admissions.
We’re in the process of rolling out a comprehensive texting campaign that connects students with the tools and resources they need most to be successful in high school and life beyond. Imagine our excitement when we saw this great post in The Quick and The Ed about texting keeping kids on track to college!
Summer melt might sound like something that happens to an ice cream cone in July. But in the world of college access, the term refers to a more troubling phenomenon: the significant number of high school graduates (some 10 to 20 percent nationally) who have been accepted to college and plan to attend but never show up in the fall.
The problem is even more acute among low-income, first-generation, college-bound students. Like their peers, they are faced with a significant number of tasks during the summer between high school and college, from understanding health insurance and filling out housing forms to figuring out the university web portals that are used for course registration and signing up for orientation.
But while lots of students need help navigating these tasks, those from disadvantaged backgrounds often can’t get much family assistance. No longer able to work with high school counselors and not yet connected to support systems in their intended colleges, too often they fall out of the college-going pipeline.
There’s some good news on this front, however. A study presented today at the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness spring conference finds that a remarkably cheap and easy technology “nudge” can keep students on track to matriculate. Harvard researchers Benjamin Castleman and Lindsay Page, who have studied summer melt for several years, show in the new paper that reaching students where they spent so much of their time — texting — can yield impressive results. Just 10 to 12 text messages sent to low-income students over the summer raised college enrollment by more than 4 percentage points in a large southwestern school district and by more than 7 percentage points in two urban Massachusetts districts.
You can read the full post here: The Quick and the Ed
Rocsi Diaz ‘Gets Schooled’ On Helping Kids Succeed!
Get Schooled is featured on NBCNews.Com today with a great story about our work with Rocsi Diaz!
Rocsi Diaz is currently the weekend host and daily correspondent on Entertainment Tonight and was previously seen on BET’s hit show 106 & Park. Rocsi is in the process of launching her new site RocsiDiaz.com which will include her own blogs about fashion, fitness, celebrity and much more.
Philanthropy is a core value for the entertainer. Rocsi is a native of New Orleans and created RocStar Foundation to rebuild schools devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Her work as a Get Schooled celebrity ambassador continues her commitment to education and empowering youth.
Getting Wins in More Than Just Athletics!
We’re proud of the success our Challenge schools have enjoyed. Here’s a great blog post about how East High in Des Moines, IA. has turned their attendance around through the Get Schooled Challenges!
Guest post by Kristopher Byam:
Des Moines East High was considered one of the lowest achieving schools in the state of Iowa just three years ago. As educators, we needed to find different ways of engaging our students to increase attendance and achieve better assessments. At that time, our administration decided to set three goals: improve attendance, increase reading scores, and lower the percentage of under credited freshman. Mr. Johns, our principal, assigned to me the responsibility of increasing attendance. I had been researching the Get Schooled Foundation, and in particular, the Attendance Challenge for a year. I thought that this would be a great way of engaging students using social media and pop culture. However, I was surprised to see how much it helped to change the school environment.
In the fall of 2011, I began to consistently follow daily attendance numbers, since the Get Schooled Attendance Challenge was a few weeks away. It was obvious that our student body didn’t see the importance of being in class. Students felt it was ok to miss school, since everyone was doing the same thing. They never realized that so many absences would truly stunt their educational experience. In preparation for the Attendance Challenge, the staff was asked to branch out around our campus. We started patrolling near by locations where students might hang out. We would talk to them, ask them why they felt skipping was ok, and convince them to get back to class.
We’re gearing up for the Get Schooled Fall Attendance Challenge Celebrity Victory Tour and East High School in Des Moines, IA, is ready to go! Congratulations again to the students and staff at East! We’ll see you soon!
Get Schooled is featured in the February issue of Principal Leadership, a publication of the National Association of Secondary School Principals. Be sure to pick up an issue and check it out!
It’s FAFSA season and everyone is getting in on the action! Check out the FAFSA4Caster on our website to help your students estimate their financial aid contribution!
