~Congratulations on our new partnership with Sisim International School in South Korea!~
As of November 5th, Lingo Online teachers have been contacting their new students. Many have already started lessons. The students are very eager to learn, and love to send penpal emails in English to compliment the substance covered in their lessons. In the past, our students have been college age or elementary school age. It is exciting to form friendships with other high school and middle school students.
We've updated our "About Lingo Online" video~ Check it out!
We're hoping to restore a focus on blogging as a means of exploration, reflection, and education. Each week, a Lingo member will be assigned to write a blog post--on anything!--a cultural experience, international news, teaching tips, etc.
~Katie Dillon
Yesterday marked our last Lingo online meeting with our beloved advisor, Mr. Strong. The old crew (plus one gung-ho freshman!) met for the period to discuss future endeavors and new leadership positions. Next school year our group will be making a few changes in how we will be running our lessons and time spent during service learning. The team also chose a new CEO and COO: Maddie Sparber and Katie Dillon! It's been an interesting year, and we wish our departing seniors good luck as the head off to college, and we will all miss Mr. Strong once he leaves for Korea.
-Emily
This week, with the absence of Mr. Strong, our meeting began with a 20 minutes session of italki as the leadership team discussed what we would use the rest of our time for.
We decided to split back into our video and project groups at 12:30, and the rest of the period was spent editing, filming, writing scripts, and updating the group blogs.
-Emily
This week we began with a check-in with our tutors about their progress with their Taiwanese students. Unfortunately, most of the students have not responded to our emails and Skype requests. The leadership team is currently working on contacting new students so we can begin lessons ASAP.
In preparation for the middle school Service Learning fair, we brainstormed ideas for the LO presentation. We decided on making a powerpoint containing our videos, songs, screenshots, etc. as well as having a few speakers from the group give our pitch to the middle schoolers.
The rest of our time was spent working on our videos, lesson plans, and separate projects.
-Emily S.
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
Today Maddie gave us a presentation about italki. Italki is a website that allows people to exchange languages through writing. We all made accounts and began correcting peoples English. This website allows us to help even more people, giving us an opportunity to spread English farther. We can also practice other languages, like Chinese and Spanish.
We also began to wrap up our videos today. Two groups are completely done and we will post their videos on the website soon!
Also, Katie D. and Emily S. had a great blog success. They had their first comment!!! Congratulations to them!
Until next week!
Chandler
Today we got into our groups to work on our videos/projects.
Emily and Katie researched information for their blog and began writing a new entry.
All the video groups got together for the second week. Last week, they met and created their video ideas and scripts. We have different kinds of videos, including situational skits and music videos. The goal of these videos is to teach English, so all of the videos focus on some category of vocabulary or everyday usage skills. If they did not finish today, the groups will meet outside of class to finish their videos by next week.
Natalie and CJ walked around to make sure everybody was getting work done. They created a checklist and recorded the video groups' projects.
Today was productive and we got a lot of work done. We should be able to edit all of our videos by next week!
More next week.
Chandler Hoffmann
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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