Today the leadership team had a serious talk about where we are and where we want to go. We have come to the conclusion that we have not done as well as we originally thought. Most of our teaching has ceased and any connections we were trying to build have not gone through.
Possible connections have been very evasive. We email and they don't. We need to try harder to build new connections so we can continue teachings. This is going to be our goal for the final trimester. Foreign forums may give us many opportunities. We will see.
Other than that, we have been doing OK. We continue to work with Italki and make/correct posts every meeting. Some teachers work on Italki outside of the service learning period. I use this for Chinese and it has really helped improve my writing. I truly believe that it really helps English students.
We have also started on our next videos! Scripts are being written, ideas formulated, and soon filming will begin. Next week should mark the start of filming.
That was a serious meeting! We shall continue next week!
Chandler
These past two weeks have been very similar. They have both included Italki and video creations.
Italki has been going great. Every week, our teachers have corrected people's posts. This has proven successful so far and we would like to continue.
Our video's have also been successful. We have two new ones that have been posted on our website. We have a third on the way and we are working on making more!
We have not been teaching as much. Student-teacher connections have been breaking from both sides. We are looking for more opportunities, but we are struggling. We hope to fix this problem before the end of the year, so next year has less problems.
We shall see what happens.
Chandler
At the end of December, we decided that we needed to plan some new projects––that our lessons were not enough on their own. One of our other goals was to give our leadership team clear responsibilities instead of the nebulous ones that we'd given them earlier.
Natalie, CJ, Chandler, and Maggy led the group in a more direct and confident way than they had before. The set the daily agenda and calling in the rest of the group to begin the meeting. A twenty-person group is not easy to organize, but they successfully placed students into teams and helped them set up a structure for decided on and reaching goals.
Lingo Online is now going to work on creating English language videos to post to our website. Two groups are creating music videos, and two groups are creating more traditional conversational English videos. We've set the final video deadline for the 26th, so we'll see if we can get them done in time.
We don't have a clear audience for our videos yet, but we're starting to make contact with some other schools. We hope that our website will eventually be a resource for them and possibly supplement their normal English curriculum.
Until next week!
-Mr. Strong
Today we had a class "therapy" session by talking about all the problems we had personally experienced. It was good to understand what everyone felt about the group's productiveness.
After getting everything out on the table, we asked the question: "Where are we headed?" We were wondering: "Are we actually productive?" The answer seemed to be: "Yes, we are productive." We have had, still have, and probably will always have bumps in the road, but we have really been doing a decent job in accomplishing our goal: Teach English.
We also talked about other student possibilities that we plan to continue looking into.
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At the end of class, we worked on the website. Everyone's' picture was taken and everyone wrote a profile for the website. I am planning on posting the pictures and profiles in the teachers' profiles section soon (or as soon as people turn them in).
That was our day and it was very productive. I can't wait to see where we go by the end of this year.
Chandler Hoffmann
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