Monthly Archives: June 2014

Help Students Get Creative with Our Media Arts Teaching Resources

teaching resources
Source: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Though the majority of your students have never known life without the internet, many don’t have photography, graphics, or web design skills. Labyrinth Learning offers several easily understood media arts teaching resources, including digital photography and web page design. Except for basic computer skills, no prior knowledge of either subject is required:

  • Welcome to Digital Photography, 2nd Edition: It can be a very daunting experience trying to determine which digital camera is best suited for a student’s particular need. The comprehensive book explains in detail what to look for when purchasing a digital camera. It teaches how to use many of the automatic features which come standard on the majority of today’s cameras. The second section of the book explains the hows and whys behind the customized manual settings including shutter speeds, self-timers, and file formats.
  • Web Page Design with XHTML/CSS: Coding is often a foreign language students are afraid to learn. This student friendly textbook has been designed with the author’s workflow learning approach coupled with Labyrinth Learning’s effective instructional technique. This ensures students learn both website coding along with the basic fundamentals on how websites work, file organization, and that ever important final step — how to make a functioning website live.

Do you want to provide your students with some of the best media arts teaching resources in the field? Please contact us at Labyrinth Learning for assistance.

Unlock Your Students’ Potential with QuickBooks 2014 Webinar QuickBooks Webinar 2014

QuickBooks learning resources
Learn more about QuickBooks 2014 with our informative webinar!

Accounting departments from small firms to mid-sized corporations have been using QuickBooks accounting for many years because of its user friendly flexibility, specialized accounting packages for different types of businesses, and ability to seamlessly share data.

QuickBooks recently introduced their latest 2014 upgrade. This is the first major update since 2007. While many of the changes are aesthetic, there are also quite a few general feature improvements, making an already simplified program much easier to learn and use.

Labyrinth Learning offers a QuickBooks 2014 webinar dedicated to helping your students get the most out of this new and exciting update. Author and editor Trish Conlon brings a laundry list of innovative tips and valuable insights, which will greatly benefit all instructors who are teaching college accounting classes.

QuickBooks 2014 has included changes to email, enhancements to job costing, updated synchronization with banking applications, and real-time information consolidation. These are only a few of the fantastic new features students will be expected to learn during a course on QuickBooks 2014. This Labyrinth Learning teaching aid includes assignments that can easily be uploaded to eLab for real time grading and immediate feedback.

Dates and times for our upcoming QuickBooks 2014 webinar will be announced soon. Please check back for more information or for assistance on this webinar or any of our additional online teaching tools. Contact us today at Labyrinth Learning for more information about our resources.

Effective Ways to Help Students Understand Accounting

resources for accounting teachers and professors
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It’s important to teach certain subjects, such as accounting, in a way that students both comprehend and retain the information. Here are some helpful tips on how to teach accounting:

  • If you mention accounting classes to students, you may see their eyes glaze over. Incorporating fun and unusual teaching methods makes the class interesting and also increases the likelihood students will actually remember the basics
  • Allow the students to separate into groups and play Monopoly. At the end of the game, have each team prepare an Income Statement and Balance Sheet. Understanding the objective at the beginning of the game can help them connect the causes and effects.
  • Incorporate numerous step-by-step examples. Over 85 percent of accounting students surveyed all agreed that this is one of the most effective ways of learning a detail oriented subject.
  • When understanding how to teach accounting, it is vitally important to remember to explain why something is being done. Students need to be told the reasons behind certain procedures for the entire process to make sense.
  • These days, many students have no concept of how a checking account operates. An accounting class is a wonderful way to teach students the tips and tricks of on-line banking, account balancing, and writing a check.

When learning how to teach accounting, Labyrinth Learning offers an excellent variety of both textbooks and online teaching tools to help both you and your students succeed. Please contact us today for assistance.

Helping Students Study for Accounting

accounting teaching resources
Source: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Some subjects need to be approached with well-defined study guidelines in order for the student to adequately understand and retain the information. While learning styles do vary, the below structured approach has consistently provided a large majority of students studying accounting with optimal results in both material comprehension and retention.

  • Have them read all assigned material before each class. This way they already have a general overview of what will be taught that particular day. Be responsive to their questions.
  • Remind students to come to each lecture prepared with the required tools, including calculators, notebooks, textbooks, laptop, or tablet. Instruct them to take detailed notes on any topic you have previously focused on, especially those subjects you know aren’t discussed in length in the textbook. Make sure you’ve provided them with a safe environment to ask questions — this is important in a student’s learning experience.
  • Talk to the students about reviewing their notes as soon as possible. When studying accounting, comprehension is a major concern, so this tip allows them to fill in any blanks while your lecture is still fresh in their mind.
  • In addition to reviewing notes, online videos, and PowerPoint presentations — have students rework some of the more difficult problems. If the textbook offers online sample quizzes, let them take advantage of this study aid.

Please contact us at Labyrinth Learning for additional educational assistance.

Easy Ways for Students to Learn Basic Accounting on Microsoft Excel

accounting teaching resources
Teach students to use Microsoft Excel for budgeting and more.
Source: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Microsoft Office Excel includes easy to use spreadsheet functionality which can simplify basic accounting tasks. Plus it supports additional add-ons when more sophisticated programs are required. Date importation from outside financial sources and even additional competing software platforms can all be accomplished when handling basic accounting with Microsoft Excel. The program offers a lot in terms of accounting abilities, making it a fantastic teaching program for students beginning to learn the accounting basics.

  • Budgeting and statements: Microsoft Office Excel comes complete with a wide variety of templates for creating basic accounting statements, including profit and loss, cash flow, and budget. More complex templates can be downloaded from the Office website and adding on specialized templates from other software vendors is a simple and easy task.
  • Spreadsheets: When performing basic accounting with Microsoft Excel, expensive accounting calculators are no longer required to figure out complex formulas. Excel spreadsheets are designed to handle both in-line and summation calculations.
  • External data: Microsoft Excel allows external data from numerous sources to be uploaded. This data can also be stored in a variety of different file formats without requiring additional data entry.
  • Integration: Another major advantage of introducing basic accounting with Microsoft Excel is that it provides easy integration with many other popular accounting applications. Many of these software applications include wizards, which work with both Excel and a separate accounting program.

For more information on how teaching basic accounting with Microsoft Office Excel can benefit your students, please contact us at Labyrinth Learning today.

How Our Accounting Basics Solution Facilitates Learning

accounting solutions
Accounting Basics from Labyrinth Learning

When teaching accounting courses, financial information must be conveyed in a clear and concise manner. Here at Labyrinth Learning, our Accounting Basics solution offers an easily understood introduction for students who wish to gain general accounting knowledge but may not be working toward an accounting degree.

Often students want accounting basics to utilize as part of their job, for personal finances or to be able to understand the importance of accounting  while taking a course like QuickBooks.  While things like cash flow and payroll accounting are the responsibility of the accounting department, it is valuable to all to be able to read a ledger sheet, track business performance, and understand the basics of profit and loss.

Labyrinth Learning provides this new basic accounting solution.  It begins with a comprehensive overview. This particular program introduces a fictional business and the accounting cycle they follow. Each new topic also includes detailed explanations so each student understands how the process works.

This is solution provides practical and easy to understand accounting basics, along with practice sets at the end of each chapter, an ongoing end of chapter problem which builds off the previous obstacle, and a scenario at the end of the course allowing students to put their recently gained knowledge to use.

For more information about our Accounting Basics textbook along with our many other interactive teaching tools, please contact us at Labyrinth Learning today.

Learn Why Payroll Accounting is Important for Students

teaching resources
Source: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Like so many other occupations, accounting has now become a career choice with specialized fields. There is specific training for areas including construction accounting, tax accounting, and one of the most security sensitive: payroll accounting. When teaching students payroll accounting, it is important they understand how having a separate payroll accounts and an accountant assists in maintaining proper internal controls:

  • One reason to separate the payroll account is for reconciliation simplicity and time management. When payroll checks and taxes are paid out of the same bank account as routine general ledger invoices, it generates numerous transactions which in turn makes monthly bank statement reconciliation more complicated and time consuming.
  • Internet identify theft and online scams in relation to payroll services is rampant these days. By creating a separate payroll account, which is linked to the company’s main banking account, money can easily be transferred to cover payroll with an additional protective layer of security guarding against fraud and theft.
  • A payroll accountant is privy to personal information including social security numbers and financial legal proceedings such as wage garnishment. Employing a separate payroll accountant who understands the confidentially requirements helps keep internal controls in place and ensures only authorized personnel have access to private payroll files.

For accounting instructors, Labyrinth Learning has a new solution available: Payroll Accounting: A Practical Real World Approach by Eric Weinstein. For information on our other outstanding curricula and teaching aids, please contact us today.

projector

Enhance Lessons with the Labyrinth Learning Video Library

projector Teaching with video tools, in addition to traditional lectures, group work, and assessments, can be an effective way to engage a wide spectrum of learners. However, if videos aren’t used correctly, they can become a “passive” teaching tool and will not have the same impact on your students’ learning process.

Here are tips for enhancing your lessons with the Labyrinth Learning video library:

Provide a synopsis. Take a little time before the video begins to “prime the intellectual pumps”. Explain what the video is about, the highlights and the key takeaway points students should be watching/listening for. This pre-viewing period is especially helpful if you feel there will be parts of the video or lesson that will challenge the students. Highlighting them beforehand will make the information more accessible.

Viewing activities. While you don’t want to interrupt the video too much, or assign a viewing activity that is too distracting, providing a few questions for students to answer, and/or selecting specific “pause points” to recap a video lesson’s main points, can be a productive way to keep students engaged.

Post-video review. Afterwards, to ensure the video’s lessons are translated to students, you should have a post-video review session, going over whatever worksheet, questions and assignments students were to complete during the video. Discuss the new material so students can further synthesize what they have learned.

Contact Labyrinth Learning for more information about teaching with video and other multi-media tools that will make your classroom a more dynamic learning environment.

Image Source: freedigitalphotos

voice bubbles

Teaching Accounting Using Twitter

More and more accounting teachers are using technology in the classroom to help their students learn both in and out of the school. Social media is a great example of a technological innovation that lets teachers and students communicate with each other outside of class.

voice bubbles
Answer questions outside of the classroom, and provide handy links, by using Twitter.

Used in the right manner, social media sites such as Twitter can produce astonishing results in accounting students. Here are some suggestions for using Twitter to teach accounting:

  • First, when teaching accounting, there will be a ton of information out there for your students to try to digest. That is why setting up a Twitter account to push out helpful links and information directly is a great way to help the students and relate to their everyday lives.
  • Second, Twitter can be used to support two-way conversations between teachers and students, which can help teachers engage their students while also ensuring that said individuals retain more of what they hear.
  • Third, Twitter’s ease of use also makes it useful for asking questions in the middle of accounting lectures. This is beneficial because increased student engagement produces better results, whether the material consists of the basic accounting principles or more advanced topics, and students can tend to be very shy. Twitter questions may help everyone get their questions in and answered.
  • Fourth, Twitter can lead students to other online material such as recorded presentations used to create a collaborative learning experience.

For more on ways to improve your teaching through new technology and new ideas, please contact us at Labyrinth Learning, today.

typing

Easy Strategies to Increase Your Typing Speed

typing
Increase your typing speed with a few of these simple tips.

Have you been looking to improve your words-per-minute on the keyboard? Here are some quick and easy shortcuts on how to increase your typing speed:

  • Research has shown typing ability is broken down into 80 percent technique, 10 percent speed, and 10 percent accuracy.  Proper hand placement technique is vital for increasing typing speed.
  • Practice makes perfect when it comes to improving your typing skills. While practicing might not seem like a very quick strategy, as little as 30 minutes a day works wonders on increasing your speed.
  • Fast and accurate typing skills are based on muscle memory and just as when learning anything new, repetition is the best way to train those muscles.
  • Keep your eyes off the keyboard. This might be difficult at first, so try covering the keyboard or consider starting out with a blank keyboard until you build up your confidence.
  • Correct posture while sitting at the keyboard ensures your hands are resting in the proper position and reduces strain on your back and neck. This also keeps your energy levels up and allows you to type faster and without injury.
  • Realize your errors are great learning tools. While it is frustrating to make the same mistake over and over, keeping a positive mindset while working to correct the problem goes a long way in improving both speed and accuracy.

If you’re looking to update and improve your teaching style and curriculum, please feel free to contact us today at Labyrinth Learning for more information on everything we offer!

Image Source: Wikimedia Commons