For middle-school or high-school students who love to read books, the theme for a blog may be right under their noses.
One of the advantages of being a school student is that you will have to read different kinds of books. There will be other books that you read because you want to. Every time you read a book, you will form an opinion about the book. Sometimes other friends may ask you for your opinion about a book if they know that you have already read it. Those opinions can be the theme of a blog.
In other words, you could set up a book review blog.
Here are a few tips to make your book review blog a rewarding activity.
No spoilers. Do not ever give away the ending of a story, or any plot twists. That would be a disservice to other readers and to the author.
Kindness. Be kind in how you judge a book. It is very tough to be an author, and you want to share only constructive opinions. If a book did not resonate with you, then suggest the kind of readers that may find the book appealing.
Intrigue. Leave some intrigue. Leave some unanswered questions. Make your readers wonder, and want to come back to read your next review.
Remember that if you can write your original thoughts about the books you read, very soon you may even find a following. Some day you may be able to meet and interview the authors of books you read and review on your blog.
Create your own rating system. If it is clever and catchy, bibliophiles
will start looking for your rating on a book, and that is powerful.
Your book reviews can also include a link to the book for readers of your blog to purchase it directly from your favorite book store.
A book review blog will help you develop powerful analytical skills that are very useful in the real world. Do consider creating your own book review blog.
This blog post is a warm-up before introducing school students to the Blog School by AlligatorZone.
The third in our series on blogging strategies for middle-
and high-school students is about how to use blogging to think aloud while
learning something new.
Thinking up topics for a blog can sometimes be a challenge. It helps to come up
with a general theme for our blog.
A simple strategy is to set the tone of a learner and write the blog as if we
are thinking aloud. It helps to pick a topic about which we want to learn more, and start writing about it, one blog post after another.
This approach can accomplish a few valuable things besides providing a steady stream of topics for essays.
Learning in public through blogging helps us rekindle or develop our innate
curiosity. The more questions we ask, the better the questions get because we
learn how to start narrowing our focus on what we want to learn, and thus our
questions become more focused. Somewhere along the way as we are growing up, we
stop asking as many questions as we probably used to, when we were toddlers.
Using a blog to revive that skill of asking a series of questions out of
curiosity is a worthwhile exercise.
Learning in public allows us to stay vulnerable and less subject to
criticism. Blogs published on the internet can attract cruel public scrutiny.
Stating upfront that we are merely documenting our learning journey in a
particular subject changes that perception that we are expert bloggers spewing
out advice to the world through the blog. Most people want to help a student
out. A blog can be an honest and authentic attempt at learning a new subject.
Learning in public allows us to find allies and mentors in our learning
journey and present their thoughts as fresh blog posts. This could take the
form of being able to reach out to experts in the field we are seeking to learn
and interview them for our blog. We could even invite them as guest bloggers.
In general, learning in public using a blog makes for a powerful strategy to
show future employers and college admissions official how we learn and how we
think. It is a wonderful mechanism to share whatever little we are learning
with others who may know less than us and are not willing to be vulnerable and learn
in public. It is said that we learn a skill must better and faster if we try to
teach it to others.
Last but not the least, using our blog to learn in public, we believe, is a
form of selfless community service, and the joy derived from that very act of
blogging and sharing one’s learning journey becomes its own reward.
This blog post is a warm-up before introducing school students to the Blog School by AlligatorZone.
When we start writing essays or blogging, it might take a
while for us to get warmed up. How does one make blogging a regular habit? Here
are a few things to try.
Take one thing or one concept and start trying to understand
it really well. If you want to use the Internet for getting a deeper
understanding of your chosen topic, then cite your sources. If you have a way
to go directly to the source, then try that because it will make your writings unique
and refreshing. For example, if you have any elder in the family who has
experienced the tsunami in Japan or in Sri Lanka, you can have a deep
conversation with them and write about their experience. If you have an
opportunity to sit down with a grand parent and learn about how life was when
they were kids, that could be a source of a unique perspective on life.
Whichever approach you take, keep your essay authentic.
You are writing down a
conversation that is in your mind, or with others, in your own way of
expression.
Feel free to write your blog posts in multiple installments
if you have not arrived at the whole story. Save it in draft mode on your own
computer. Write out the whole thing and post each installment separately, one
after the other. When you do that, try to end each piece of the overall story
with some sort of intrigue or a cliff-hanger. This can make it engaging for the
reader.
Others may not have the same kind of exposure to the things you
write about. That may be the world of video games or the kinds of experiences about
which you are writing. Take the time to explain concepts, scenarios, and things
in simple and non-technical language, without assuming your readers know it so
that they understand what you are trying to convey exactly as intended.
Try to be kind and helpful to your readers when you share
your knowledge by writing on your blog. Give them some context for the topic
you are addressing and try to paint a picture with your words to help your
readers get in the right frame of mind for being able to enjoy your article.
Do not be afraid to use your blog post to pose a question or
leave questions unanswered. The readers may not answer it. However, just
posting the question will help you think about it later, and you may find your
way to the answer as you start thinking about it.
We will share more ideas for making blogging a joyful
pursuit for the middle school and high school student. Remember, blogging is a
written conversation you are starting, first with yourself, and later as you
build an audience, with people who want to hear your perspective.
This blog post is a warm-up before introducing school students to the Blog School by AlligatorZone.
Spencer Burleigh, cofounder of Rent the Backyard once casually
mentioned that he wished he had started maintaining a blog when he was in
school. Later, we at AlligatorZone invited him for a special podcast to hear
more of his views on blogging. Along with reading this essay, please also consider
listening to that podcast (linked here).
Now, back to the topic of this article. By ‘body building’,
what we mean is building a body of work.
Remember the chicken or egg situation that students leaving
college sometimes face, where they do not get hired because they lack work
experience, and do not have work experience because they do not get hired?
Blogging addresses this challenge by allowing a student to display a body of work easily to the outside
world.
A blog empowers students to independently publish their best
work and make it easy for anyone to get a quick glimpse into how they think.
What can be a body of work for a middle-school or a high
school student, you may wonder. School projects in a favorite subject can be a
body of work. Deep thoughts about a passion project or a hobby demonstrate a
body of work.
If you can write about your schoolwork or hobby and bring your
own perspective, it will be unique and refreshing. What you write in your blog
can be interesting to any reader who wants to learn about the subject you love
and to learn about you.
Your blog is one simple way for your self-promotion without
self-promoting.
However, the benefit does not end there. Regular blogging by
itself results in a steady flow of creative expression. That makes a blog its
own body of work. Something that every employer in industry, every college
admission official and every professional looks for is whether a candidate has
clarity in expressing ideas and can write in an engaging manner. A carefully managed
blogging strategy, where students write consistently and find their voice will
pay huge dividends for a long time.
This article is a ramp up to our launch of our new module ‘Blog School’. Learn about our other programs at AlligatorZone.org
October 24, 2019 — Recently, NATS Tampa had organized a town-hall meeting where I had the privilege of presenting our findings to a group of high-school students and their parents, on how students may prepare for career success in industries of the future.
In our journey with AlligatorZone, we have learned that a vast majority of college-bound students start with undeclared majors and start exploring the world only after they start college. Our AlligatorZone events, where students and startups come together in meeting rooms to have conversations are one of the greatest forms of exploration you can find, and lately, we see high-school students taking an active part in our programs.
Nine out of 10 incoming freshmen think they’ll graduate with a bachelor’s degree in four years or less, according to an annual national survey conducted by a research institute at UCLA. But the U.S. Department of Education reports that only 41 percent of them do. The average student takes 4.4 years to earn a bachelor’s degree from a research university and 4.8 years from all other kinds of institutions, the advocacy group Complete College America says.
Changing majors is a huge contributor to this. It means many students end up taking courses they don’t need, then scurrying to complete the ones they do. The result is that bachelor’s degree recipients take and pay for 15 credits, on average — an entire semester — more than they need, according to Complete College America. Some give up altogether.
Explorations delayed till college come at a steep cost, both financial and emotional. Such delayed exploration also impacts student-debt.
That is why AlligatorZone has started an awareness campaign for both students, as well as parents, so that families know there’s affordable help.
I appreciate the invitation from NATS Tampa for this town-hall meeting. They do phenomenal work in Tampa Bay.
Given below is a synopsis of the talk, for those students who missed the session.
It’s hard to seek internships when an employer does not know what differentiates you from others seeking internship.
That is why it is important to think of personal branding.
Personal branding can be about something personal, such as a hobby.
The idea is to provide a peek into your mind, by communicating your thoughts, your ideas, your projects, and your view of your world.
This need not be a high-maintenance endeavor. It could be something as simple as a blog.
What is hard is to know what to write in your blog.
The important thing is to learn how to write like a marketer — to influence, inform and impact your audience in a positive manner. After all, we are selling the idea of having an employer give us that internship position, or we are selling the idea of a college official grant us admission to that coveted seat.
That is where the exploration programs of AlligatorZone help. They help you add substance to your style in whatever you create.
Whatever you create is incomplete until you document it.
The next thing to do is to explore where your values will align with how different industries operate, to figure out where you might like to make an impact.
To make an impact, find out what comes naturally to you and what kind of skills you need to develop.
Last, but not the least, learn about a variety of things with an open mind.
Ideas from completely unrelated areas may help you solve a problem in a unique manner.
Some of the parents approached me for one-on-one coaching, so if you want that, please feel free to reach out to me.
ALT
Picture credit: NATS Tampa
Other parents expressed interest in our home-based program.
Finding the right information and making various pieces of the puzzle fit to tell a coherent story, is the hardest part.
That is one of the areas where AlligatorZone helps you.
We believe that one can effectively begin on this exploration in the 8th grade. However, I have seen even 5th graders do really well. Our youngest subscriber right now, is a 9 year old girl, who is doing really well.
College students who are still with undeclared majors, or undecided and switching majors, will also find AlligatorZone incredibly valuable.
In other words, it is never too early and never too late to join AlligatorZone.
We believe in the power of story-telling to create hooks for students to start exploring.
That is why we launched AlligatorZone’s at-home program.
High-school students in the audience mentioned that the school counselors mainly provide advice on colleges.
There aren’t many resources to explore the world of work and industry, they say. Our home-based explorations may be a good place to start by visiting https://AlligatorZone.org/programs.
October 23, 2019 — Over the past five years, we at AlligatorZone, have observed how digital natives connect the dots between what they learn in school or from friends on the one hand, and lessons from the real-world startups we feature and their transformative products, on the other. It makes me tremendously optimistic and excited about the future that the children are going to build.
Our teens and tweens belong to a no-nonsense generation.
The views of teens and tweens on matters such as personal privacy, customer empathy, or use of natural resources, are going to surprise many businesses in the foreseeable future. The children who meet startup founders in our programs are already making eye-opening contributions to conversations about how a product or service ought to be made differently. They do not mince words, and never fail to surprise and delight the startup founders with their robust common-sense, their maturity, sensitivity, and their perceptive understanding of the world of which they want to take charge.
Sadly, their potential is not being recognized, and unfortunately, very few parents can afford to make the time required to inspire their children. Very few of the well-intentioned parents who sign up for our events are able to actually bring their children to the venues. Very few parents have the time to devote to finding good reading material and sources of information for their children. Most parents seem to have resigned to the false assumption that their children are addicted to screens and will only use sites like Netflix and YouTube.
I was recently advised to consider offering ‘video snacking’ to cater to the limited attention spans of the demographic. I must disagree. Uninspiring content gets limited attention. If the reading material or viewing material involves great storytelling tied to a cause they care about deeply, then tweens and teens stay riveted for long uninterrupted sessions to untangle problems and come up with clever solutions on issues that matter to them and to the world at large.
Parents seem to underestimate the capabilities and sense of purpose of teens and tweens, in my observation.
Many parents do not give enough credit to tweens and teens for staying incredibly curious to learn from sources where they see a path to a rewarding future that aligns with what means a lot to them. In our week-long summer workshop, one 11-year old cared so deeply about cats getting euthanized when pet-shelters run out of room, that he worked relentlessly for 7 hours a day, 5 days a week, to craft a program to teach people about the joys of cat-ownership and to support pet shelters.
Other examples are that of teens and tweens being really tuned in to things such as what can make something go viral and how to create a movement for a cause. The teens and tweens who come to AlligatorZone events are amazingly engaged with the knowledge they get to soak up. They do follow YouTubers and may watch Netflix or scroll through Instagram and Tiktok, but that’s primarily their source of entertainment. It builds personality and is part of their social conversations, but they are aware, that alone is not enough. Teens and tweens rise to the occasion when a parent or teacher entrusts them with world class coaching, high quality reading and viewing material, and opportunities for greater self-awareness. That is probably because the students we see at AlligatorZone are indeed very aspirational and very ambitious. More importantly, they seem to care about wealth creation for all.
That is why we are painstakingly building our premium at-home learning program at AlligatorZone, with carefully curated and contemporary storytelling to prepare students of today for the future of work. This holiday season, you can gift or buy a subscription for a low monthly fee https://AlligatorZone.org/premium.
Let’s not underestimate how much our children are learning from various sources, and how eager they are to contribute to the world and to make a positive difference. Let’s not be dismissive about how serious they are to create wealth and their ability to make good choices. Let’s just make sure we spread a lavish buffet of real-world knowledge, besides the knowledge they are already gathering, so that they can make those good choices before they get into college or the world of work. Let’s make sure they have the opportunity to develop self-awareness to figure out what they might enjoy doing in life. Let’s make sure we help them position themselves to easily obtain access to the skills required, the coaching needed, and the differentiation to help them become standout candidates on the path to their calling.
The author is Ramesh Sambasivan, co-founder of AlligatorZone, where students meet startups to learn about the future of work.
There seems to be a misconception about personal branding as it relates to middle-school and high-school-age children.
In my recent essay announcing our new trajectory, I had talked about getting kids ‘started on a journey of building an authentic and distinctive personal brand for themselves’. That has generated some discussion. “You didn’t explain what you mean by personal branding for children,” said my mother, a career-educator and retired elementary school teacher. Another parent said she didn’t really care about branding children’s image for the outside world. Allow me to clarify what we mean by personal branding in the context of AlligatorZone’s young members. In the video below, I have summarized my thoughtfully written explanation, if you scroll down further.
Ramesh Sambasivan, cofounder & CEO, AlligatorZone.org explains what a personal branding journey for a young person would look like in AlligatorZone’s new community membership premium plans.
Branding in general starts with knowing oneself. That applies to products, companies and people. We can’t communicate about ourselves to the outside world unless we know who we are as individuals and what keeps us ticking.
The first step in branding is self-awareness.
For children to know what excites them, why something catches their fancy, and where they can personally create the most positive impact, is a deeply introspective process. It is usually an observant parent or a teacher who knows first about a child’s authentic personal brand. You may hear that in the way a mother describes how her son always knows what colors go together on a greeting card that he’s painting, or how her daughter instinctively knows which song is playing upon hearing the first few instrumental notes.
How will our AlligatorZone Activity Premium Plan help in developing the personal brand of the children? The various activities that we are designing for children are a way for them to wrap their young minds around complex concepts through playful observation of the world around them and asking the right questions.
Through these tethered flights of exploration of the future as it is being created, the children will start getting an idea of what facets of their exploration they enjoy the most and, what areas attract an audience. Along with their parent or teacher, the children too will start recognizing their own personal brand and its value at the confluence of their interests, their positive impact, and their audience.
Along with their parent or teacher, the children too will start recognizing their own personal brand and its value at the confluence of their interests, the positive impact they can make, and their audience.
Then comes the question of how they express that personal brand to eventually arrive at their true calling and a community that cares about the positive impact that the child can create. It is a question also of how they take charge of their personal narrative and make it a coherent story of who they are why they deserve a chance to make an impact in any field. That coherent narrative brings compounded benefits when it is delivered with consistency over a period of time.
That coherent narrative brings compounded benefits when it is delivered with consistency over a period of time.
This is also another way for a child to develop habits that can be fulfilling and rewarding.
That is where the Ambassador Advantage plan aims to step up kids’ personal growth, by giving them opportunities to slow down and enjoy learning without feeling pressured, while taking the time to use their innate talent to express themselves through various media — be it creating poetry, art, coding, writing, public speaking, woodworking, emojis, mime or memes.
Allowing their personal brand to manifest through their preferred forms of expression will help children achieve amazing clarity about the kind of impact they would like to make in the world, and how.
We want to give opportunities to children to do this in a manner so elegant that the slice of the world where they believe they can make an impact, can’t help but take notice of their body of work.
The children’s distinctive and authentic personal brand thus gets built automatically, over a period of time, without conscious effort, without orchestration, while generating compounding returns, over a long period of time or even over a lifetime.
A personal branding journey for children can’t be rushed.
A personal branding journey for children can’t be rushed. It takes time, constant nurturing, and tremendous patience on the part of the parents, but a journey for personal branding is a worthwhile investment for parents to make. As with all of AlligatorZone’s programs, our emphasis remains on providing a learning environment that is forgiving, supportive and uplifting for the young impressionable minds, and provides active support and encouragement from parents and educators.
The author Ramesh Sambasivan, is cofounder & CEO of AlligatorZone.org, a membership community developing tools to help parents and teachers prepare children for the future of work. Learn more at https://alligatorzone.org.
What began as a fun family project has evolved into a serious education company with a noble mission
Believe it or not, it’s been five years of delivering AlligatorZone’s free public events! To celebrate our 5-year anniversary, we are changing our trajectory by setting ourselves some lofty goals, and I am really excited about it.
AlligatorZone is morphing into a membership community. Membership will be free, which means we will continue to have event programs where kids and teens can meet cool startups.
What’s particularly exciting is a new set of premium plans that discerning members will be able to layer on top of their free membership. These premium subscription plans have specific goals.
For instance, you may have observed children binge-watching video clips and shows on the Internet. These are fast becoming the next generation’s primary source of knowledge and entertainment outside of school. Children deserve better choices. I know it is not easy, but we are up for the challenge. Our new premium plan called AlligatorZone Activity addresses this issue through thoughtful, playful and compelling activity-based learning that children can pursue at their own pace in the comfort of their homes. More importantly, the Activity plan aims to ensure that children never outgrow their innate sense of wonder and curiosity, and that they develop habits that make them life-long learners.
The other thing happening, which you may not be aware of, is that several middle-schoolers and early high-school students have been asking to do more with AlligatorZone, in the form of projects and roles, that I would characterize as personal branding initiatives. Our new Ambassador Advantage Premium Plan aims to provide them with amazing opportunities by extending AlligatorZone as a platform for them to get coached, and to practice and perfect skills to become standouts in whatever path they choose, while getting them started on a journey of building an authentic and distinctive personal brand for themselves, and, we hope, gaining priceless clarity of purpose along the way. [Here’s a subsequent blog post, explaining what we mean by ‘personal branding’]
Besides playful learning activities, these new premium plans will include training and certifications as tools to develop good personal branding habits for life.
So that’s where we are taking AlligatorZone. I hope you will continue on this journey with us. Ask your friends to also become members of AlligatorZone and let us make this movement a meaningful one for families everywhere.
On this fifth anniversary, I sincerely thank you being a part of AlligatorZone.
Ad-tech startup Priatek’s CEO, Mr. Milind Bharvirkar pictured hosting AlligatorZone families in his boardroom.
Entrepreneurship is an intensely intellectual and extremely social journey of understanding a problem and solving it in a resourceful manner for people. Entrepreneurship is not just writing a business plan or presenting it to a group of grown-ups to win a medal or a small check.
Entrepreneurship coaching, even for grown-ups, which over-emphasizes the theatrics of a stage performance in a pitch competition puts the cart before the horse. There is a need for public speaking skills, but at a later stage. Entrepreneurship usually starts with being mindful in research, a lot of listening, and rolling up one’s sleeves in search of the best way to make a customer delighted, or just to make the customer breathe a little easier.
The way AlligatorZone Academy’s summer camp curriculum is designed and delivered is therefore different from what parents might typically see at an entrepreneurship boot-camp for children and teens.
In AlligatorZone Academy’s summer camp, we help children and teens (ages 10–15) with introspection so that they figure out what they would like to pursue as a project over the next year or so. Then we provide them with mental models and frameworks to making decisions on various aspects of taking their product to the market, and letting the market decide if their work deserves recognition with actual sales. Participants in the summer camp will use real-world productivity tools just like any startup founder, and learn to think like startup founders, without using jargon. The focus is on first principles of entrepreneurship so that the kids and teens really grasp the core concepts and use them as building blocks of life-skills that will stand them in good stead no matter what their future career and calling. We steer the children, with the support of their respective families, towards the steps needed to take an idea and make a product out of it, working alongside them step-by-step with a compressed launch-program to help them get their project off the ground in the real world.
There are no plans for pitch competitions, no award ceremonies and no participation medals. Just a close-knit community of students who help one another out, and have a blast just being their creative selves, without pressure.
The kids leave AlligatorZone’s workshops with a sense of quiet confidence and pride about a body of work that they started from concept, and depending on the time on hand, progressed sufficiently forward to a stage of creation and validation in the real world. After the workshop, the kids and teens may continue to build in order to differentiate themselves as a distinctive personal brand.
This summer, AlligatorZone is formalizing a layer of support after the summer camp. AlligatorZone will continue to provide the students with a low-maintenance yet highly effective subscription plan to provide guidance to the children and teens with the help of a supportive community, should they wish to continue on their entrepreneurial education and journey.
Further, parents may also consider taking their children to attend our free public AlligatorZone events (https://AlligatorZone.org/Attend). Read this blog post about why those events are important. (http://bit.ly/2Wvz51d).
Here are three reasons why it is important that we as parents and guardians must do whatever it takes to make the time to attend AlligatorZone’s events with our school-age children or teens:
1) Startup entrepreneurs are known to change entire industries. Attending AlligatorZone gives families and their children fresh insights into how an entire industry is going to change. When an industry changes, the skills required to find meaningful work also changes. Educators and parents who are able to turn the steering wheels of their children’s education with better foresight about what is around the bend, will be more effective in guiding children in navigating the future.
2) Startup entrepreneurs who make the time to present at AlligatorZone are a very special group of innovators. They spend time preparing on how to present complex concepts in very simple terms so that even a third grader can understand what they are working on. Startup entrepreneurs who come to AlligatorZone to present their work are also usually extremely patient with children in satisfying the children’s innate curiosity, or in talking to the more grown-up kids and teens after the event.
3) In AlligatorZone, kids and teens are taken seriously. We try to make sure that we make the most of the forum to provide the kids with opportunities to learn priceless soft-skills or power-skills. In our observation, this builds tremendous confidence in the children. AlligatorZone attracts a very supportive audience, allowing the children and the startup founders to be themselves and have an honest conversation.
If you haven’t been to an AlligatorZone event, try to attend a free event in your locality and enjoy a uniquely uplifting shared experience with your child, giving the entire family something very meaningful and inspiring to talk fondly about for many years to come.
About AlligatorZone®:
Since June 2014, AlligatorZone®, where kids meet cool startups, has toured 20 communities from Silicon Valley to South Florida, showcasing close to 150 startups to young school-age audiences, helping families learn about the future of work directly from the entrepreneurs who are designing the future. Visit https://AlligatorZone.org to learn more.
