Remember Kurtis? Well, meet his sister, Keena. She was the first in the family to use Zinch after hearing all about it from her mom. So, she signed up and told her brother to as well. Then Kurtis won a scholarship and now they are both receiving money. Like I said, this family has it good. Two smart kids who are helping their parents pay for college through scholarships. Have you invited your siblings to Zinch? You can do it here (be sure to log in).

Keena plays soccer, rugby, and swims and is just about to start her junior year in high school. And she already has some of her college paid for. Can you say the same? She is one smart girl.

When I asked her how she was more than a test score, this is what she said. “My knowledge goes farther than just a test about school.” We agree, Keena.

• Duke or UNC, UCLA or USC?  Here’s one more thing to consider in a college- average graduate salaries.  This is a new report from Payscale, a site that collects data on salaries from different professions.  They recently released an updated monster list (from more than 1.2M users) on the salaries of graduates from hundreds of universities and colleges.  Equally exciting, we found another list of schools most likely to deliver a Harry Potter experience.  Drumroll…

Top US Colleges — Graduate Salary Statistics

See complete list at http://www.payscale.com/best-colleges/top-us-colleges-graduate-salary-statistics.asp

Best Undergrad College Degrees By Salary

See complete list at: http://www.payscale.com/best-colleges/degrees.asp

Clearly Facebook and Myspace dominate the social media scene for most teenagers.  And how about Twitter- have you got  any tweeps and are you tweeting?  Whatever your preference, it will interest you to know how some colleges are embracing social media:

1. Howard Rheingold, who has taught at UC Berkeley in the recent past as well as at Stanford University, has the following course outline for the Virtual Communities/Social Media class he taught this spring:

“Students will take away from this course a set of conceptual tools, a vocabulary, and an analytical framework with which to recognize, understand, and more effectively manage new social practices online, together with a familiarity with the literature regarding social media and identity, community, collective action, public sphere, social capital, networks, and social technology development.”

• 1. University of Texas at Dallas history professor Monica Rankin uses Twitter in her classes to help encourage participation and organize and transmit topics, discussions and questions. Rankin refers to this effort as the “Twitter Experiment” and notes on her Web site, “Most educators would agree that large classes set in the auditorium-style classrooms limit teaching options to lecture, lecture, and more lecture. And most educators would also agree that this is not the most effective way to teach. I wanted to find a way to incorporate more student-centered learning techniques and involve the students more fully into the material.”
  2. Melanie Mcbride, a faculty member at Centennial College in Toronto, Ontario has done away with textbooks and uses social bookmarks (link “social bookmarks”) to http://teachingtechnology.suite101.com/article.cfm/using_social_media_in_education) instead:

• “Social media is a great tool for bringing the classroom to life. I use social bookmarks instead of traditional textbooks in my courses because I need the content to be cutting edge. It doesn’t get any more cutting edge than the content that’s online. So instead of a textbook I used social bookmarking tools like Delicious to share the most current articles, websites or content, and my students subscribe to the RSS. Every time I add a new bookmark, they are notified automatically.”

Research conducted at the University of Rochester has shown that action video games- like Unreal Tournament and Counter Strike for example- can give a person the ability to monitor more objects in their visual field and do so faster than non-gamers:

In the experiment all of the participants in the Bavelier-Green study rest their heads on a chin rest and stare at a square in the center of a computer screen. Randomly a target… flashes at one of twenty four possible locations on the screen. Immediately the screen is flooded for about a second with a clutter of circles, squares, and lines. Finally, the screen goes blank and the participants are asked to remember where the target had originally appeared on the screen. Regular video-game players do this with about 80% accuracy, while nonplayers get it right only about 30% of the time. [From Think Smart: A Neuroscientist’s Prescription for Improving Your Brain’s Performance by Richard Restak .]

A second experiment showed that even non-gamers could do much better on the test after a mere month of game play. So for those of you  who don’t play, there’s hope! J

So you’re saying, “yeah, but I want to be a doctor, so thanks but no thanks.”  Well, funny you mention it, because:

Surgeons who play video games more than three hours per week commit 37 percent fewer errors in the operating room, are 27 percent faster at laparoscopic skills… and are 33 percent faster at suturing than surgeons who don’t play video games.

The researchers point out that gaming is no substitute for building other areas of the brain, and that exercises that demand prolonged attention, such as reading or solving maths problems, are likely not helped at all by extensive game-playing.  So, next time you get grief for playing your Xbox 360 or WI, now you’ve got some justification.  Try this on, “Mom, I’m stimulating my brain, increasing my cognitive skills, and am now less likely to ever suffer from the effects of Alzheimers.”  And let us know how that works out for you…

Mooching is in right now. And it’s pretty easy. You sign up for Zinch, you invite a friend and if they win, you win. The best win-win situation you’ll ever be in.

Kurtis Shepherd was referred by his sister, he won, so then she won. Not to mention, we matched his scholarship too! Man, their family has it pretty easy thanks to Zinch. I got to pick his brain for a second or two and he’s got a bit to say.

How did you hear about Zinch?
Through my mother and sister.

What would we find you doing on a Friday night?
Either working at my job or relaxing with my friends in someone’s basement.

What’s your fondest memory of high school?
Being captain of my rugby team and leading them to our highest finish in state since the club’s creation.

What are you planning on studying in school?
I plan on majoring in Sociology. I took a course on it in high school and found it immensely interesting.

Where do you see yourself five years from now?
Hopefully with my own job, paying off all my college loans.

Why the University of Wisconsin-Madison?
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has a reputation for being the best state school in Wisconsin. I want to be a part of that.

What excites you most about going to college?
The chance and risk that goes with being able to make all my own decisions.

How do your parents feel about you leaving for college?
They knew it would come, at this point they’re holding it together.

Hold it together, Mom and Dad, you’ve got a great kid here who has a good head on his shoulders. Congrats, Kurtis! We’ll be hearing from his sister, Keena, later.

Zinch really helped them out and can help you too! Start mooching!