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TG Updates
Order your 2008-09 TG Academic Year Planner
Meetings, deadlines, appointments, events, plans, to do lists, agenda items, notes, numbers. In today's work environment, time is a precious resource, and using it to the fullest is a challenging but essential task. To help, TG has created an easy-to-use daily planner you can order now.
Intended for schools, the 13-month 2008-09 TG Academic Year Planner includes a variety of useful features. A calendar with all holidays for each month is followed by notes pages for each week, where you can keep track of important events, meetings, and reminders. An address book is also included for contacts.
Each month also features a concise default prevention or financial literacy tip. These tips range in subject from planning a default management campaign to sending out reminders to students ending their grace period.
Along with these many practical elements, the planner offers inspirational quotes and imagery. Each month features a quote by significant historical figures, writers, and thinkers, such as Winston Churchill, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Margaret Mead, as well as beautiful landscape photography to help accentuate the season.
To order the 2008-09 TG Academic Year Planner
You can order the 2008-09 TG Academic Year Planner by visiting TG Online at www.tgslc.org/order/index.cfm.
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Offer students the financial literacy basics with TG's online resources
Even before they come to campus, your students are bombarded with credit card offers. Once at college, they face other temptations now that they're living on their own, perhaps for the first time, handling a large volume of cash in the form of a financial aid check.
With TG's help, you can prepare your students to manage their money and safeguard themselves against unnecessary expenditures. TG offers a variety of financial literacy tools designed to help you teach students the basics of money management, including videos and a set of online interactive resources illustrating the consequences of poor credit card use.
Here's a look at a few of these tools.
Statement reader: Credit card statements are filled with terms, numbers, and percentages that play a role in the calculation of a credit card balance. TG offers an interactive tool for understanding these terms and calculations — available through the Adventures In Education (AIE™) website at http://www.aie.org/College/Paying/Earning/Credit/interactivecreditstatement.cfm — which displays an example credit card statement. Users just move their mouse over each part of the statement to read pop-up text that concisely defines a term or explains a calculation.
Purchase simulator: TG's Credit Card Skills Builder, also available through AIE at www.aie.org/College/Paying/Earning/Credit/index.cfm, demonstrates the cost of credit cards after finance and interest charges are added. The tool guides users through a simulated credit card spending spree and then calculates a virtual credit card bill summarizing purchases, available credit, and amount owed.
Short credit card video: TG's short video — Pizza Cravings and Credit Cards — targeted to high school and college students follows a student as she encounters an on-campus credit card marketer, contemplates a credit card offer in the mail, and receives an "intervention" of sorts on using credit cards. Available for online viewing at www.aie.org/College/Paying/Earning/Credit/index.cfm, the video teaches some basic card management skills simply and in an entertaining way.
Financial literacy program overview video: TG offers Positive+Balance™ to help schools teach financial literacy skills to students. Positive+Balance consists of training sessions on a variety of financial literacy topics, including money management, budgeting and saving, credit cards and credit reports, and identity theft. A short online video at www.tgslc.org/positivebalance/index.cfm offers an overview of Positive+Balance. To learn more about the program for your campus, contact your TG account executive at (800) 252-9743.
Find out for yourself
A listing of a variety of TG's online financial literacy tools can be found by visiting AIE at www.aie.org/financialliteracy/index.cfm.
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Texas State Technical College Harlingen creates a learning community for students, thanks in part to a TG grant
Careers that require technical training are some of the fastest growing job fields in the country. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the health services industry is hiring more workers each year than many other industries. Telecommunication and engineering experience are in high demand. And agriculture and manufacturing companies are always in need of workers who are skilled in product design and development.
The Texas State Technical College Harlingen (TSTC Harlingen), a 2-year college of the TSTC System, has designed a learning environment to support high school students interested in a technical profession. The program, called the Living and Learning Community, brings together high school students and TSTC Harlingen undergraduates who serve as mentors on technical topics.
The purpose of the program is three-fold: Encourage high school students, especially first-generation students at schools with low going-college rates, to consider technical fields and sharpen their technical skills; motivate TSTC mentors to persist in college as a result of their mentoring; and promote financial aid literacy to TSTC Harlingen students and high school students and their parents through a series of financial aid literacy workshops. TG supports the program with a grant from its Public Benefit Grant Program.
Math camp basics
According to program administrator Richard Kirk, school mentors develop the curriculum for the Living and Learning Community. "The TSTC school mentors guide students in hands-on projects that teach specific math and technical skills," said Kirk. "They also answer student questions about technology careers and educational requirements to complete degrees for entering technical professions."
The Living and Learning Community, which was offered to high school students in a recent summer institute held on the Harlingen campus, included a mathematics lab for students who performed below the Texas Higher Education Assessment (THEA) requirements for successful completion of the state's remedial math benchmark.
"Students were taken through a curriculum that allows them to build on basic math concepts," said Kirk. "The first week introduced students to fractions, percentages, decimals and word problems. The second week, students learned pre-algebraic equations and, in the third week, graphing." Throughout the program, students were given real-life problems to solve in order to learn critical thinking skills.
Mentors benefit from the program too, gaining experience in teaching students and serving as examples to prospective college students. The close relationship between student and mentor serves to reinforce a mentor's commitment to getting a degree and enrich his or her understanding of the learning process.
TSTC Harlingen has also designed a financial literacy workshop aimed at parents and students. The workshop teaches financial literacy skills and concepts through exercises and practical scenarios. Discussion focuses on the cost of a college education, personal budgets and spending plans, and resources for financing a college education, among other topics.
"We hope to continue the financial aid literacy component through e-mentoring, regular contact with project participants during the high school year, and periodic seminars for students and parents during the school year," said Kirk.
About TG's Public Benefit Grant Program
To receive funds, organizations are required to submit proposals that address the issue of access to, or retention in, postsecondary education for low- to moderate-income students.
To learn more
If you'd like to learn more about TG's Public Benefit Grant Program, you'll find a description of its purpose and process on TG Online at www.tgslc.org/publicbenefit/index.cfm.
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