DISTANCE LEARNING

How Does this work ? Does this work at all ?

Distance Learning (DL) is an instructional delivery system that connects learners with educational resources. Distance Learning provides educational access to learners not enrolled in educational institutions and can augment the learning opportunities of current students. The implementation of Distance Learning is a process that uses available resources and will evolve to incorporate emerging technologies.

Features:

1. The separation of teacher and learner during at least a majority of each instructional process.
2. Separation of teacher and learner in space and/or time.
3. The use of educational media to unite teacher and learner and carry course content.
4. Providing two-way communication between teacher, tutor, or educational agency and learner.
5. Control of the learning pace by the student rather than the distance instructor.

Benefits of Distance Learning:

Expanding access: As it offers the possibility of a flexibility to accommodate the many time-constraints imposed by personal responsibilities and commitments so distance education can assist in meeting the demand for education and training demand from the general populace and businesses.

Making money from emerging markets: It claims an increasing acceptance from the population of the value of lifelong learning and that institutions can benefit financially from this by adopting distance education. 
Less expense constraints: The system reduces the demand on institutional infrastructure such as huge buildings.

Source for institutional transformation: The competitive marketplace demands rapid change and innovation, for which it’s believed that distance education programs can act as a catalyst.

Disabilities, Handicaps, or sicknesses: Millions of students from all around the world are not able to attend traditional schools due to different reasons or problems. For example some are sick, some are physically disable etc. Distance education can help in these cases because the students will not have to leave their home or be around other people. It makes it possible for these students to still learn and to be able to get a good education.

Equal Opportunity to Education Regardless of Status: Students have the opportunity to receive equal education regardless of income status, area of residence, gender, race, age, or cost per student.

Types of Distance Learning: There are two major types for distance learning.1) synchronous instructions, 2) asynchronous instructions.

1. Synchronous instruction: It needs the constant participation of all students and instructors. The advantage of synchronous instruction is that interaction is done in "real time" and has immediacy. Examples include interactive telecourses, teleconferencing and web conferencing, and Internet chats.

2. Asynchronous instruction: It does not require the simultaneous and continuous participation of all students and instructors. Students are not supposed to get together in the same location at the same time. It depends on students that they may choose their own instructional time frame and interact with the learning materials and instructor according to their suitable timing. This type of instruction is more flexible than synchronous Examples of asynchronous delivery include e-mail, listservs, audiocassette courses, videotaped courses, correspondence courses, and WWW-based courses.

POSITIVE STUDENT RELATIONSHIPS

Dos & Don'ts for Building Positive Student Relationships

By: Rachel Levy

Teaching is a unique profession because its success is based heavily on knowledge, craft, and relationships. No matter how strong the craft, imparting knowledge will be nearly impossible if the relationship between you and your student is absent.
The teacher-student relationship should be one of trust; the student should not be afraid to show some vulnerability to their teachers. Students and their families should be able to turn to teachers for advice, and see them as authorities on education.
One real struggle in the teacher/student relationship is creating a positive, caring learning environment without getting overly involved with students. Now, I’m not talking about the media-magnetic stories of teachers becoming inappropriately involved with students. Such incidents, but those types of incidents triggered the need for teachers to be more cautious and clear about boundaries when dealing with students. 
For a positive teacher/student dynamic to exist, teachers must be reliable, respectful, and empathetic to students and their families. Teachers should take into account each individual student’s background and family situation, considering the whole child.

Related Articles

Dos & Don'ts for Building Positive Student Relationships

Teaching is a unique profession because its success is based heavily on...

7 Surefire Tips to Find a Teaching Job

Have you just completed your teaching degree and are looking to start your...

Friday Five: 5 Favorite Teaching Apps

This list provides the top 5 facorite teaching apps that every educator should...

Transforming Digital Natives to Digital Citizens

This real teacher blogger shares how she helped her digital savvy students turn...

10 Priceless Gifts Teachers Can Give Their Students

With the holiday season upon us, the spirit of giving is everywhere you look....

Fostering Positive Student/Teacher Relationships
Help Students & Parents Get to Know You
To open the lines of communication and establish a relationship with students and their families was by starting the school year, try writing a letter to students and families. 
You can read it aloud to the class and send it home. When I use this in my class, I share where I am from, where I had previously lived, my education background, my professional history, why I had a passion for teaching and education, some of my strengths and weaknesses as a teacher, and some information about what I liked to do and about my own family. I end the letter by encouraging students and families to communicate with me, providing my contact information.

Getting to Know Your Students
To learn more about my students and their families, you can try:

• Have students write their own letters of introduction to you. This served the dual purpose of learning about the student’s life/background and providing me a writing sample to assess writing skills.
• Request an (optional) letter from families to you.
• Have students complete a questionnaire which included questions regarding:

• contact information
• education background
• languages spoken at home (I was an ESOL teacher)
• medical or health concerns
• pet peeves
• internet access at home
• afterschool jobs

The Pitfalls of Getting Too Involved with Students
Respecting Students Privacy & Dignity
All the above being said, too much intimacy and involvement has its pitfalls. You should use your knowledge of students’ family situation and background in conjunction with your knowledge of their academic strengths and weaknesses to inform teaching. 
I was very careful to explain to students why I wanted to learn more about them (to help inform my teaching) and to assure students all information would be kept private. Teachers should never bring up information students have shared during class. Even in private conversations with students they should be very careful to respect students’ privacy and dignity.

Balancing Your Relationship with Students’ Families

While it is a teacher’s job to support a child’s positive developmental and educational growth, they should be involved in students’ educational lives, not in their family lives. 
It should be clear to students that their teachers care about them and are there to support their learning. It should also be clear that they are their teachers, not their friends or peers, nor are they friends of family members when wearing the “teacher hat.” For example, a teacher should not get involved with counseling families in their family matters.
DO: Counsel families on matters such as coming up with a homework plan or establishing positive learning environments at home. 
DON’T: Give advice to parents about navigating marital problems or when their children should be permitted to go on a first date. 
DO: Refer students and their families to the appropriate professionals, such as a school counselor or social worker, to help resolve or locate other professionals and resources to help them to resolve such matters.
Remaining Objective as a Teacher
Despite close relationships, teachers must treat all students fairly. While teachers should evaluate students individually based on progress and effort as well as performance, all students should follow the same rules and be held to high expectations. Teachers should consider what they know about what’s going on in individual students’ lives in deciding how best to teach them, but not change expectations. 
For example, if a student’s family is in the middle of a disruptive move:
DO: Consider extending due dates or facilitating the student completing more assignments at school. 
DON’T: Exempt the student from a project and allowing them to catch up on socializing in class.
Clear Communication & Responsibility
Communication and responsibility are also key elements in the student/teacher relationship. 
Students should be heard and know that their concerns and opinions are taken seriously, even in moments of disagreement, but they must not disrupt the learning of others or be disrespectful. Teachers cannot disregard behavior problems because they know a student has a troubled home life. It doesn’t serve the student, their classmates or the quality of education in your classroom. 
As students need to know that they are ultimately responsible for their actions, they should also understand that they, first and foremost, are in charge of their own learning, with the teacher engaged to help them get there. 
As you continually strive to teach the whole child, I hope these strategies for building positive, productive student/teacher relationships.

CYBER BULLYING

CYBER BULLYING

Cyber bullying is bullying that takes place using electronic technology. Examples of cyber bullying include mean text messages or emails, rumors sent by email or posted on social networking sites, and embarrassing pictures, videos, websites, or fake profiles. Sometimes cyber bullying can be easy to spot — for example, if your child shows you a text message, tweet, or response to a status update on Face book that is harsh, mean, or cruel. Other acts are less obvious, like impersonating a victim online or posting personal information, photos, or videos designed to hurt or embarrass another person. Some kids report that a fake account, web page, or online persona has been created with the sole intention to harass and bully. Cyber bullying also can happen accidentally. The impersonal nature of text messages, IMs, and emails make it very hard to detect the sender's tone — one person's joke could be another's hurtful insult. Nevertheless, a repeated pattern of emails, text messages, and online posts is rarely accidental.

RELATED ARTICLES

Cyber-Bullying Coming To A Cell Phone Near You

Cyber-Bullying - A Dark Side of the electronic communications

Cyber-bullying

Cyber Bullying

Cyber bullying means using the internet to inflict emotional or psychological harm on someone, and it often has devastating consequences.  In October 2006, for example, teenager Megan Meier from Missouri committed suicide after being lulled into a fake online friendship by the mother of a former friend who was posing on MySpace as a 16-year-old boy named Josh Evans.  After weeks of being friendly with Megan, "Josh" suddenly began insulting her and spreading rumors about her to her real-life friends.  Two days later, Megan took her own life.

Cyber bullying reflects the dark side of forming and maintaining friendships online.  According to Hinduja and Patchin's (2009) research:

• Among adolescents, 43 percent have experienced some form of online harassment.
• The most common cyber bullying acts are posting messages on semipublic spaces (such as social networking pages) that make fun of another person, distributing gossip to an individual's social network via e-mail or text message, and posting or distributing embarrassing photos of someone without his or her permission.
• Girls are twice as likely as boys to be the victims of cyber bullying.  They are also twice as likely as boys to be the perpetrators of cyber bullying.
• Cyber bullying affects all age groups that interact online, but it is most prevalent among individuals15 to 16 years old.
• The most common reason people give for perpetrating cyber bullying is to get revenge on the victim.
• Online victims of cyber bullying are 8 times as likely to have carried a weapon to school in the previous 30 days as non-victims.

AdChoices

Parents can help stop cyber bullying. You can start by talking to kids about the issue and teaching them the rules below that will help prevent cyber bullying from happening to them or someone they know. Since most cyber bullying takes place at home, it's important that parents know about cyber bullying and that they get involved in preventing it. Just like parents help their kids avoid inappropriate websites, they can protect them from cyber bullying. It's important to realize that bullying has reached new levels with technology in the hands of kids and adults. It has just gotten easier to bully with a phone in almost every teen's hand linked to photos, texts and social media.

The number of people a bullying comment can reach in a matter of seconds is staggering. Once a picture or comment is online, getting it back can be impossible. The anonymity people feel behind the keyboard also makes it easier to bully others. Doing a search on suicides linked to cyber bullying turns up too many sad stories of young people who felt they could not match the power of the Internet and gain control of the teasing. Popular celebrities have been speaking out on the issue, and the media is making an effort to spread the message. We all need to do our part. It takes even more of an effort to find out about cyber bullying and intervene to keep our families safe.

Tips for a better writing

http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/default.aspx

Common Errors LINKS TO STUDY

Links:

http://www.beedictionary.com/common-errors

http://listverse.com/2008/09/11/another-10-common-english-errors/

http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/errors.html

http://listverse.com/2007/09/19/10-common-english-language-errors/

Hope it´s useful!

Advantages and disadvantages of Facebook- Cochi Martinez

Facebook is the most popular social networking of all time. The popularity of Facebook is increasing so much that soon it will reach 1 billion members. Many people out there who passes most of their time on Facebook. There are manyadvantages and also somedisadvantages of Using Facebook. So, i have decided to discuss about this advantages and disadvantages of using Facebook.

Advantages of Using Facebook

# Facebook is free and it's one of the best medium for communication.

# With Facebook you can connect to any type of people from anywhere in the world because almost every people around the world use Facebook .

# Facebook is best for finding Old friends. When a friend goes away to any other place we often don't get the chance to communicate with him or her. But now Facebook gives us the opportunity to communicate with any of our Old friend.

# We can share our feelings an what's happening around in our daily life through Facebook. We can also get feedback from our friends. It is the best medium to share your feelings and thoughts with others.

# Facebook has good privacy setting which gives you the option to customize according to your wish.

# Facebook Fan pages , groups , events etc are getting popular day by day. You can use these Fan pages & groups for promotional activities . If you would like to know how to create a Faceboo fan page and customize it then click here

# You can use Facebook groups to connect all your close friend unitedly. All the post of the group will be private. It also has new features like group chatting, notification to all members whenever anyone post anything etc

# you can chat with friends by facenbook chat box.

# Many popular celebrity and organization uses Facebook to give updates to their fans. So with Facebook you stay closer to any famous person or organization.

# Students can use Facebook for group study by creating a group only for studying. There you can share any information about your projects , home work , assignments , exams , due date etc.

# Facebook is also popular for making love relation and dating.

# Facebook online games are really popular and addicting. There are millions of people who uses Facebook only for playing games with their friends.

# Facebook has thousands of application, quiz, games etc which is increasing it's popularity day by.

# Facebook plays a very important role in getting latest valuable information. You can gather information from your friends post, Fan page updates , groups etc

# We can also use facebook as social bookmarking site. We can share our article, blogs , photo's etc to thousands of people.

# Facebook like button is connecting their user to every other website. With single like button now you can bring everything inside Facebook.

# If you have a Facebook login ID than you don't need to waste your time for registering other site. Most of the site now allows a user to login at their site by using Facebook Login ID

# Facebook is well designed! There is no fancy color or design available which distracts people.

# Spamming! no spamming actually not a big problem in Facebook because you can easily hid the post of the spammer of block them permanently.

Disadvantages of Facebook

Now it's time to talk about some disadvantages of Facebook. There are some Disadvantages of Facebook beside these many advantages. Some of these disadvantages are :

#. Facebook is Addicting! Facebook is too much addicting! Facebook is too too addicting! Yes it is indeed addicting which often kills your valuable time. Using Facebook for your need is not bad but when you waste most of your valuable time than it becomes bad. The biggest disadvantages of Facebook is it's addiction which causes many problems.

# Fake profile and ID! Fake profile is one of the biggest disadvantage of Facebook. Now it has become easier to create fake profile. People often uses fake profile to insults or harassing someone. It is more common against girls where people simply makes a fake profile and start harassing them. In my country i have got news that some girls died y suicide when someone abused her by making a fake profile of her.

# There are plenty of groups and Fan pages out there which is being created to abuse or violate other religion , personalities , nation etc. This kind of racist disgusting activities decreasing some popularity. Facebook administrator should take necessary steps against all these abusing groups & pages.

# Facebook often brings bad effects on students results. Students who are Facebook addicted does a bad result on his or her exams.

# Beside students, people who works in offices wastes their time in browsing Facebook. That's why many offices has decided to block Facebook completely.

# False report! Many people lost their precious Facebook ID because of false report. Facebook administrator should be careful on that.

# Facebook chat doesn't work properly. User often face trouble while chatting in Facebook.

# From different newses it is found that sometimes Facebook can be life threatening. Many unknown people can track your activities and where you are going. As a result you can face trouble. So be careful in choosing friends and keeping your activities private.

# News also found that one mother killed here child because it was crying in hunger while she was browsing Facebook. or A husband killed her wife because she changed her relationship status.

So from the above statement it is clear that Facebook can be dangerous as well

I hope this hub will be useful for someone who likes or hate Facebook ;) Please do comment and share your experience with Facebook. 

Source: http://tnvrstar.hubpages.com/hub/The-advantages-and-disadvantages-of-using-Facebook

HIGH TECH: CRIME OF THE FUTURE

NASA breach update: Stolen laptop had data on 10,000 users

Breached unencrypted laptop puts personal data of NASA employees and contractors at risk, spokesman says
Computerworld - Personally identifiable information of "at least" 10,000 NASA employees and contractors remains at risk of compromise following last month's theft of an agency laptop, a spokesman told Computerworld via email Thursday.

Agency employees had been told of the October 31 theft of a laptop containing the personal data from a locked car in an email message Tuesday from Richard Keegan Jr., associate deputy administrator at NASA.

In the email, Keegan told employees that the stolen laptop contained sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) on a large number of NASA employees, contractors and others. Unspecified NASA documents were also stolen from the car, he added.

"Although the laptop was password protected, it did not have whole disk encryption software, which means the information on the laptop could be accessible to unauthorized individuals," Keegan warned employees in the email.
Responding to questions from Computerworld today, NASA spokesman Allard Beutel acknowledged that agency waited nearly two weeks to publicly disclose the breach. He said that in the interim, NASA was working with law enforcement personnel to recover the laptop, and was working to determine exactly whose personal data was stored on it.

"NASA immediately began working with local law enforcement after the laptop was stolen, with the goal of recovering the computer and protecting the sensitive data," Beutel said in the agency's first public update since disclosing the theft to employees. "At the same time, NASA IT specialists and security officials began performing an exhaustive automated and manual analysis of the data to make sure everyone with information on the stolen laptop is notified."

The agency is currently in the process of notifying the victims of the breach, Beutel added.

The theft prompted questions about why personal data is stored on a laptop and why it wasn't encrypted.

The incident prompted an immediate agency-wide initiative to implement full disk encryption on all NASA laptops by Dec. 21, starting with those carried by teleworking employees.

Beutel said the laptop was stolen from a teleworking employee whose job responsibilities included reviewing personally identifiable information.

NASA does have rules stating that all individual files with PII should be encrypted, Beutel said.

However, he added, "The stolen computer was password protected, but some of the specific files were not encrypted as required by NASA policy. The hard drive also had not yet received the whole disk encryption software as part of the ongoing agency-wide effort."

Until all agency laptops are fully encrypted, NASA telecommuters must use encrypted loaner systems, Beutel said.

"Employees are being directed to review the information contained on their computers to ensure all sensitive information is appropriately encrypted at the file level, and to purge all unneeded sensitive files," he said.

Source: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9233701/NASA_breach_update_Stolen_laptop_had_data_on_10_000_users?taxonomyId=82

Free fruit at school tied to fewer junk snacks

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Norwegian children attending schools where free fruit was on offer ate less junk food and drank less soda than before the fruit was available, according to a new study that also found kids from disadvantaged households seemed to benefit the most.

Although fruit promotion programs are thought to succeed in getting kids to eat more fruit, it's been unclear whether children were just adding those snacks on top of what they were already eating.

"Previous work has shown fruit consumption goes up when they offer the program, but this study adds that consumption of junk food goes down," said Punam Ohri-Vachaspati, a professor at Arizona State University School of Nutrition and Health Promotion, who was not involved in the study.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture encourages children and adults to eat more fresh fruit as part of a healthy diet, and some schools participate in the agency's Fruit and Vegetable Program, which provides free fruit and vegetables to students.

In Norway, schools can also sign up for a free fruit program, in which children who enroll are given a piece of fruit daily, or for a subscription program, in which parents pay a fee to have fruit given to their kids at school.

Nina Cecilie Øverby, the study's lead author and a professor at the University of Agder in Kristiansand, said that she and her colleagues have found both types of school program are associated with an increase in how much fruit kids eat.

But to find out whether the fruit is replacing other foods, they surveyed about 1,300 6th and 7th graders at 27 schools in two Norwegian counties - first in 2001 and again in 2008.

In 2001, before any of the schools initiated a fruit promotion, the kids reported that they ate an average of 6.6 unhealthy snacks per week.

These included soda, candy and potato chips.

By 2008, five schools had a free fruit program, 10 schools participated in a fruit subscription plan and 12 schools had no official fruit program.

At that point, children at all of the schools reported they were eating less junk food - an average of 4.4 times per week.

Øverby noted that this overall reduction reflects nation-wide initiatives to reduce sugar-sweetened foods and drinks.

"In addition, there was much publicity about the potential negative health effects of added sugar in this time period," she told Reuters Health in an email.

Still, kids at schools with a fruit program showed even larger declines in the amount of junk food they ate than those at the schools with no official program.

Children who attended the free-fruit schools, for instance, ate 2.8 fewer junk food snacks each week in 2008 than their counterparts in 2001.

In comparison, kids at schools without a program ate 1.5 fewer junk food snacks in 2008 than in 2001, the researchers report in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

When researchers looked at the children's family backgrounds, they found that those whose parents had no higher education generally consumed more junk food than more advantaged peers, but also showed the biggest drop in consumption.

In 2001, kids from disadvantaged households had unhealthy snacks an average of 7.3 times a week; in 2008 that figure had dropped to 4 times a week in schools with free fruit and 4.9 times where a fruit subscription program was available.

"A reason why schools with fruit programs see the largest decrease of unhealthy snacks compared to non-fruit program schools could be that when fruit and vegetables are available for the pupils, their need for energy is satisfied, and there is not the same need to consume unhealthy snacks," said Øverby's co-author, Elling Bere, also a professor at the University of Agder.

Bere added that fruit - with its high levels of water and fiber - is satiating, and can help to reduce kids' hunger for unhealthy snacks.

The study did not show whether kids at schools with a fruit program ate fewer calories overall or if the reduction in junk food made any difference to their health.

Bere said his team is conducting more research into whether these changes have any impact on children's risk for obesity.

Helping kids learn to make healthy diet choices at an early age is likely to have lasting impacts on their decisions into adulthood, Ohri-Vachaspati said.

SOURCE: http://tinyurl.com/95n9dz8 The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, online October 3, 2012.

Collective vs. Individualistic Societies ( Article from NY times)

This article corresponds to the topic of collectiveness on pages 122-123 (Unit 10) CAE-CPE

DAVID BROOKS    THE NEW YORK TIMES Collective vs. individualistic societies
August 14, 2008
CHENGDU, China
The world can be divided in many ways – rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian – but one of the most striking is the divide between the societies with an individualist mentality and the ones with a collectivist mentality.
This is a divide that goes deeper than economics into the way people perceive the world. If you show an American an image of a fish tank, the American will usually describe the biggest fish in the tank and what it is doing. If you ask a Chinese person to describe a fish tank, the Chinese will usually describe the context in which the fish swim.
These sorts of experiments have been done over and over again, and the results reveal the same underlying pattern. Americans usually see individuals; Chinese and other Asians see contexts.
When the psychologist Richard Nisbett showed Americans individual pictures of a chicken, a cow and hay and asked the subjects to pick out the two that go together, the Americans would usually pick out the chicken and the cow. They're both animals. Most Asian people, on the other hand, would pick out the cow and the hay, since cows depend on hay. Americans are more likely to see categories. Asians are more likely to see relationships.
You can create a global continuum with the most individualistic societies – such as the United States or Britain – on one end, and the most collectivist societies – such as China or Japan – on the other.
The individualistic countries tend to put rights and privacy first. People in these societies tend to overvalue their own skills and overestimate their own importance to any group effort. People in collective societies tend to value harmony and duty. They tend to underestimate their own skills and are more self-effacing when describing their contributions to group efforts.
Researchers argue about why certain cultures have become more individualistic than others. Some say Western cultures draw their values from ancient Greece, with its emphasis on individual heroism, while other cultures draw on more on tribal philosophies. Recently, some scientists theorized that it all goes back to microbes. Collectivist societies tend to pop up in parts of the world, especially around the equator, with plenty of disease-causing microbes. In such an environment, you'd want to shun outsiders, who might bring strange diseases, and enforce a certain conformity over eating rituals and social behavior.
Either way, individualistic societies have tended to do better economically. We in the West have a narrative that involves the development of individual reason and conscience during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and then the subsequent flourishing of capitalism. According to this narrative, societies get more individualistic as they develop.
But what happens if collectivist societies snap out of their economic stagnation? What happens if collectivist societies, especially those in Asia, rise economically and come to rival the West? A new sort of global conversation develops.
The opening ceremony in Beijing was a statement in that conversation. It was part of China's assertion that development doesn't come only through Western, liberal means, but also through Eastern and collective ones.
The ceremony drew from China's long history, but surely the most striking features were the images of thousands of Chinese moving as one – drumming as one, dancing as one, sprinting on precise formations without ever stumbling or colliding. We've seen displays of mass conformity before, but this was collectivism of the present – a high-tech vision of the harmonious society performed in the context of China's miraculous growth.
If Asia's success reopens the debate between individualism and collectivism (which seemed closed after the Cold War), then it's unlikely that the forces of individualism will sweep the field or even gain an edge.
For one thing, there are relatively few individualistic societies on Earth. For another, the essence of a lot of the latest scientific research is that the Western idea of individual choice is an illusion and the Chinese are right to put first emphasis on social contexts.
Scientists have delighted to show that so-called rational choice is shaped by a whole range of subconscious influences, like emotional contagions and priming effects (people who think of a professor before taking a test do better than people who think of a criminal). Meanwhile, human brains turn out to be extremely permeable (they naturally mimic the neural firings of people around them). Relationships are the key to happiness. People who live in the densest social networks tend to flourish, while people who live with few social bonds are much more prone to depression and suicide.
The rise of China isn't only an economic event. It's a cultural one. The ideal of a harmonious collective may turn out to be as attractive as the ideal of the American dream.
It's certainly a useful ideology for aspiring autocrats.

what is stress?

What is stress?

Stress is simply a fact of nature -- forces from the inside or outside world affecting the individual. The individual responds to stress in ways that affect the individual as well as their environment. Because of the overabundance of stress in our modern lives, we usually think of stress as a negative experience, but from a biological point of view, stress can be a neutral, negative, or positive experience.

In general, stress is related to both external and internal factors. External factors include the physical environment, including your job, your relationships with others, your home, and all the situations, challenges, difficulties, and expectations you're confronted with on a daily basis. Internal factors determine your body's ability to respond to, and deal with, the external stress-inducing factors. Internal factors which influence your ability to handle stress include your nutritional status, overall health and fitness levels, emotional well-being, and the amount of sleep and rest you get.

Stress has driven evolutionary change (the development and natural selection of species over time). Thus, the species that adapted best to the causes of stress (stressors) have survived and evolved into the plant and animal kingdoms we now observe.

  

Source: http://www.medicinenet.com/stress/article.htm#What_is_stress