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August 2023

Home Improvement

Is a Keurig Worth It?

by April Norman on

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In our article today, we are going to help you compare Keurig to its competitors and figure out is a keurig worth it? We will talk about why you should get a Keurig machine, what factors to consider when deciding which Keurig machine to get, and when you shouldn’t get a particular type of Keurig machine.

History of Keurig

Keurig was founded in 1992 by John Sylvan and Peter Dragone. Since then, the company has grown a portfolio of over 100 brands. Keurig made the My K Cup, and it was available for sale in 1998 across the U.S., and most recently, in 2016, these Cups are 100% recyclable.

This prestigious company is top rated on most coffee maker lists and has won numerous awards in the last decade, including the American package design award, the food and beverage innovators award, and the corporation of the Year award.

Why Get a Keurig

Some of the Keurig machines are relatively small and lightweight. These small lightweight machines are very useful for persons who do not have a lot of space available for a coffee maker or need to move their coffee maker around from time to time.

The portability of these coffee machines makes them ideal for ever-changing office spaces, small apartments, college dormitories, and so on.

Quality Coffee/Latte/Cappuccinos and Other Beverages Made Easy at Home

Some people really enjoy getting their beverages from coffee shops because of the consistency and quality that they get at these places. Some coffee machines simply cannot reproduce this, so it makes no sense you get them.

Some Keurig machines allow you to adjust the temperature and the strength of your brew so that you can consistently get the taste you enjoy. In addition to this, Keurig also offers coffee makers that can brew lattes, cappuccinos, and other specialty drinks from the comfort of your home.

Carafe for Friends and Family

A lot of Keurig alternatives on the market do not offer a carafe option, but Keurig has a few coffee makers that are compatible with a carafe. Having a carafe coffee maker in your home allows you to not only brew single cups for yourself but enables you to brew a full carafe to serve other people, such as visiting friends or family members.

Besides having coffee in bulk for friends and family, a hot carafe of coffee enables you to simply pour your coffee anytime you want without having to brew a fresh cup.

K-Cup Compatibility

Keurig K-Cup pods can be considered as the universal standard for coffee pods. All Keurig machines are compatible with these K-Cups, but they are not only produced by Keurig. There are hundreds, if not thousands of coffee, tea, and specialty drink makers that produce their products in K-Cups.

This means that owning a Keurig coffee maker gives you the added convenience of brewing thousands of different flavors without having to worry about dealing with pod compatibility.

Prices

Keurig coffee makers are not usually the most affordable on the market but are also not always too pricey. Their basic models can be anywhere from 30 to 50% more expensive than competitors.

The models that they offer that can be considered mid-range like the K-Duo are somewhat on par with the market price for coffee makers in that class. Their luxury end models like the K Cafe are more expensive than similar coffee makers in most cases, between 30-50%.

When is a Keurig not worth it?

Keurig machines are quite convenient and very useful in most cases, but sometimes getting a particular type of Keurig coffee maker is a wrong choice. When this happens, the device is just not worth it in the end. Read these topics carefully to ensure that you don’t waste your money.

Buying a Single-Cup Reservoir Coffee Maker for Many People

If you have a large number of persons that crave coffee in the morning, buying a single-serve coffee maker with a single-cup reservoir, just won’t do. This coffee maker will not be sufficient to serve everyone, so instead, get something with a carafe or at least a big enough water reservoir.

Buying Carafe (K Duo) For a Few People

If you don’t have a lot of coffee cravers at home or you don’t entertain many people, there isn’t a need for you to get a Keurig machine with a carafe. Carafes are particularly useful when you have many persons who need coffee or if you drink multiple cups in a short period.

If you buy a Keurig machine with a carafe and you don’t use it, you are really wasting your money, and if you get the Keurig K Duo, you are wasting counter space as you could have gotten a smaller model.

Buying High End with Loads of Features That are Never Used

If you like your basic cup of joe without the bells and whistles, then you should think about getting a Keurig machine without the bells and whistles. One of the great things about the Keurig line of coffee makers is that Keurig has something for everyone.

There are basic models with little to no additional features, all the way up to the luxury models with tons of features. If you know that you will never utilize extra features after you have purchased your Keurig coffee maker, you don’t need to spend extra money to buy a large coffee maker that you won’t fully utilize.

Buying Basic Models When you Prefer Specialty Drinks

If you know that you are not a basic coffee lover, try not to waste your time getting a basic Keurig model, as it will not be sufficient for your coffee needs. If you get a basic model and don’t enjoy the type of coffee it produces, you will very likely get your coffee from a coffee shop, and your coffee maker will be unused.

Keurig has plenty of coffee makers that allows you to brew different strengths and types of beverages. The K Cafe is one with multiple drink options, so if you know you love your specialty drinks, make sure you get a Keurig coffee maker that can make them.

How does Keurig compare to its competitors?

Keurig machines are in some ways better and in others not as good as some of their competitors. In general, the Keurig machines that are budget options or basic models generally have similar features to their closest competitors, except a self-cleaning option, and they are usually more expensive.

The Keurig machines in the mid-range have a lot of similar features to competitive brands, and the prices are generally similar. Unfortunately, at the luxury end of the line, Keurig machines are generally higher-priced, and they don’t always have as many features as their competitors.

Thinking of Buying a Keurig, a few things you should consider

Keurig has a vast line of coffee makers, so it is easy to get sidetracked with the different models’ features, but remember that you should try to spend within your budget. If your budget is unlimited and you will need all the features, then go ahead and get whichever machine fulfills that need.

If you have a budget that can accommodate a machine with some useful features that are better than the basic model, there are quite a few machines that you can choose from. If you have a limited budget, Keurig also has machines that may not have a ton of features but can produce quality coffee at the lower end of their product line.

Counter Space

Coffee makers come in multiple different sizes and shapes. Before you get a coffee maker, think about where you are going to put it. If you have unlimited space, you don’t have to worry about this.

Identify a space in your kitchen or wherever in your home that your coffee maker will be used, and consider the amount of space available before making your purchase. If you only have a small amount of space, but you need a coffee maker capable of producing a lot of coffee, you can think about getting the Keurig K Duo Plus.

What will You Need it For

If you need a coffee maker that can produce specialty beverages such as lattes, cappuccinos, and others, you will need to get a coffee maker like the Keurig K Cafe. If you need a coffee maker that can produce for multiple persons at one time, you will need to get one of the Keurig K Duo models as these have a carafe.

Try to match your needs with the coffee maker that has features to satisfy them. It is always best you buy based on your needs so that you don’t waste your time getting a coffee maker that you will need to replace shortly.

Conclusion

Keurig has a very famous, reliable line of products, but they are somewhat pricey and not always the best on the market. They have many useful features and a vast range of options to choose from but so do other competitors. Weigh your options before purchasing so you don’t regret it.

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Education

Hyper-Individualized Teaching – Education Rickshaw

by April Norman on

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Everyone has their ideas about what will fix education. One way to categorize these ideas is through the dichotomy of progressive and traditional approaches to education. Progressivism emphasizes setting the conditions to allow students to find their own way to subjects, and traditionalism emphasizes the importance of an expert bringing subjects that are of value for society – a tradition – to the student. It’s obviously a bit more complicated than this, as we discussed in 10 episodes of the podcast, Progressively Incorrect.

Another way to categorize the various solutions is whether they place an emphasis on the individual or the collective. On the one hand, we cannot deny that our classes are filled with 30 individuals who differ in significant ways. Everyone, apart from twins, is born with a unique genetic makeup and raised in separate environments from each other. It is therefore tempting to be drawn to reforms that hyper-individualize the curriculum based on difference. Learning styles and preferences, personalized learning, student voice and choice, and now UDL, are based on individualistic assumptions.

On the other hand, as most teachers don’t deal with single students but with groups of 30, it makes sense to focus on what students collectively have in common. We can be confident that variation is bound by the laws of statistics, and that we are all endowed with a similar cognitive architecture; working memory is extremely limited, practice is best spaced out over time, and so on. While cognitive scientists have yet to uncover all of the properties of the mind, patterns have emerged that allow us to identify core practices and principles that will likely help students learn. Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction is an example of an inventory of such core practices and principles. In the event that our formative assessments tell us that a student did not learn from these methods, we can use frameworks such as RTI to design and carry out interventions. We might look for ways to address the learning gap through small group instruction, or we might decide to make an accommodation or modification to the curriculum in accordance with the student’s IEP. This systematic approach to teaching and learning is how the best teachers, in my view, transform groups of seemingly dissimilar students into competent, self-efficacious classroom communities.

I recently attended a webinar on Universal Design for Learning (UDL), the latest take on the old idea that individuality, not commonality, should steer teachers’ decision-making. If we were an evidence-informed profession, we would dismiss UDL on the grounds that randomized controlled trials and meta-analyses have yet to demonstrate its effectiveness (Boysen, 2021). But we are not a profession that concerns itself with evidence, and UDL sounds promising because it proports to make learning accessible to everyone. I was hoping the webinar would deliver a compelling argument for how UDL improves upon the standard teach-assess-differentiate model that is the cornerstone of RTI and high quality instruction.

The presentation began with a slide displaying the pithy maxim that “variation is the rule, not the exception.” Fine. What does this mean for teaching phonics, 5 paragraph essays, or the pharaohs of Ancient Egypt? Sadly, the speaker basically refused to provide specific examples of how the maxim could be applied. We were told, instead, that students are so different from each other (they even change day to day, minute by minute) that it’s impossible to prescribe guidelines for teachers. We were also told to accept a number of terrible metaphors, including a pool party that forced attendees to wear a one-sized-fits-all bathing suit. If you wouldn’t plan a party like this, why would you teach like this? Again, there were no specific accommodations, modifications, or logistical considerations of a UDL-based system that could be shared. Are we permitted to allow partygoers to bring their own bathing suits, but forbid skinny dipping? Or is that not kosher in UDL?

Clearly, education would benefit from fewer of these nebulous presentations, and greater attention towards implementing the strategies that research in instructional design and cognitive science tells us will have the highest impact on learning. We can be confident that modeling and worked examples help embed information initially, and scaffolds ought to be gradually removed to allow students to practice independently; Formative assessment and feedback allow teachers to respond in real time to student misunderstandings; Providing students with opportunities to review in spaced out intervals helps students to further cement these new understandings.

The most interesting moment of the presentation, for me, was when one of the speakers cited the cognitive scientist, Daniel Willingham, as an important influence on his work. He even recommended we check out Willingham’s excellent book, Why Don’t Students Like School?. I wonder if the speaker has ever read what Willingham has to say on his presentation’s topic:

Of course, students will differ with regard to how they respond to and benefit from any single instructional strategy in a given lesson. There is no doubt that students have individual differences that are both situational and preferential. And there is no doubt that effective teachers address these differences using their own experience as a guide.

But when it comes to applying research to the classroom, it seems inadvisable to categorize students into more and more specialized groups on the basis of peripheral differences when education and cognitive sciences have made significant progress in describing the core competencies all students share. Teachers can make great strides in improving student achievement by leveraging this body of research and teaching to commonalities, not differences.

Willingham & Daniel, 2012

References

Boysen, G. A. (2021). Lessons (not) learned: The troubling similarities between learning styles and universal design for learning. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/stl0000280

Willingham, D., & Daniel, D. (2012). Teaching to what students have in common. In Educational Leadership (Vol. 69, pp. 16–21).



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