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Edworks’ Active Learning has provided
progressive educational services and resources for almost
15 years. In recent times, Edworks has added new and valuable
features to its programs that greatly complement worldwide,
home-based education. These include:
1. Self-help book: ‘Working Smart’
This is a self-help book that home-based teachers should not
be without! Among its many insightful chapters, ‘Working
Smart’ presents a concept that most curriculum based
programs totally ignore: learning how to learn. For
students who explore what it has to offer, it will bring greater
awareness, meaning and pleasure to the process of learning.
For the home-based teacher, it will greatly facilitate his
or her work.
In a friendly, easy-to-read style, psychologist
and Edworks’ CEO, Greg Nicholson, offers ‘Working
Smart’, as a powerful, guiding light to equip students
from upper primary/elementary to senior secondary years, with
the skills to meet and beat the challenges they may
face along an often demanding and stressful, academic pathway.
They are skills unknown to many teachers and seldom found
in the classroom.
Greg has used his training and extensive experience
in teaching and psychology, to give students the awareness
and means to take the drudgery out of school work while
improving their marks. Inspired by the continuing successes
achieved by his students, Greg has chosen significant aspects
of the Edworks' programs which he personally created and developed.
Among these, he stresses that the skill of written communication,
is paramount. In fact, in his broad experience involving thousands
of students, Greg hails writing skills as the greatest predictor
of success in school life and beyond. ‘Without such
a skill,’ he asks, ‘how is one's knowledge or
understanding of an issue to be effectively expressed, whatever
the subject - be it English, Geography, History, Maths or
the Sciences?’
In developing the skills for working smart,
students will learn how to avoid procrastination and fear
of failure, and how to reduce stress. Using the Working Smart
Two-Factor Model, they will be shown how to prioritise their
workloads; and they will be offered logical, efficient, note-taking
short cuts to save valuable, study time.
The early stages of the book are punctuated with
numerous, short and easy exercises designed to build student
awareness. There are four chapters devoted to upper primary/elementary
students, offering them a head start to their secondary years,
whilst a greater part of the second half of the book is dedicated
more (but by no means exclusively) to senior secondary students
wishing to refine their essay writing skills for the immediate
challenges of their final school years, - or for younger secondary
students, the challenging years in store.
‘Working Smart’ offers innovative
and detailed assistance through helpful practice programs
that include a daily, step-by-step, 10-week program of 15
minute exercises. Together with the guidelines for working
smart, these programs encourage students to move towards
independence and have the potential to create success not
only during a student's academic life, but throughout the
complex and increasingly competitive, adult years ahead.
2. Edworks’ global, online Practice
Exams & Skills Assessment
This is a valuable resource of particular relevance to home
schoolers, worldwide, seeking to enter or re-enter
the public or private school system.
 Edworks’
Practice Exams & Skills Assessment
prepares students to sit for SSAT, Stage 4, GCSE, Scholarship,
Accelerated Program and School Entrance exams (private and
public) by familiarising them with a prescribed examination
structure. This enables students to apply the skills and strategies
they have learned, to the formalised structure of the exam.
Unlike some curriculum-based services, Edworks’
online Practice Exams & Skills
Assessment provides more than a basic score. As part
of the feedback response to an Edworks Practice
Exam, Skills Assessment offers students, parents and
guardians key pointers on the skills and strategies still
needed to improve competitiveness and performance in exams
and the classroom. This constructive feedback identifies typical
reasons students may have failed to successfully complete
tasks and offers immediate insights into general problems
that may be encountered when addressing exam questions. It
may be as simple as misreading a question or failing to employ
deductive reasoning to achieve a solution. This serves to
highlight the specific skills that each student needs to further
develop or refine.
Thus, Edworks’ Online
Services offer students important opportunities to
gain:
- a clear understanding of examination formats
- insights into study and time management and how they can
effectively apply their skills to formal examination settings
- an assessment of current skill levels
- feedback to use as tools to further develop and refine
exam techniques and strategies
- the ability to assess areas of interest they may wish
to pursue, in-house, at Edworks’ centres
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