Annual Report 2013

Annual Report 2013

Kidlink Association
Established 2013/12/30

APPROVED BY THE BOARD

AofA Art 5 says: "The Board's Annual Report and Financial Statement must be sent to the members together with the notice to the Annual Meeting." Once approved by the Annual Meeting 2014, the document will be made public from the Kidlink Association main page at http://www.kidlink.org/drupal/AM-2013 

The Annual Report informs the Kidlink Association members about activities during 2013 and how the Board has worked to realize the plans for 2013 as documented in http://www.kidlink.org/drupal/AR-2013

Kidlink Association Financial Report 2013

  • Kidlink Association Financial Report 2013 is sent as a separate document.

Board Meetings

  • The Board had 8 ordinary Board meetings during 2013.
  • The Board also had several informal meetings on Skype and in google drive documents.

  • The last 4 meetings have been held in asynchronous web mode during one week. This because we have had big difficulties to have synchronous meetings in Skype.

  • The Minutes have not been sent to the members as previous years, but will be done before the Annual meeting.

 

Kidlink Association  Membership and sponsorship

  • We have not succeeded in getting more KA members and individual sponsors. During 2013 we had 25 members. Maybe we didn't inform enough, during this past year,  about the importance to have paying members and that membership does not mean consuming meetings, but only partecipation and votations in Annual meeting. 
  • 951 SEK were donated by members.

Volunteers

  • We often moved our Board dialogue to our Project Skype chat  (where there are several teachers involved or interested in Kidlink projects) to make our work more visible and get new volonteers from the teachers interested in the projects. Even if there are many teachers in this channel, the dialogue inside has been not-continuous and sporadical and just a few, besides of the Board members, took part.

Kidlink Dialog and documentation

  • To inform about our website,  start projects and tell about our activities we created a Facebook Group in June 2012. We have now 190+ members. Several new teachers  have been involved in the projects by this group. We have worked with Facebook group and pages during 2013.   Facebook seems to be a very useful service that connects teachers interested in Kidlink Projects. There are now more groups in FB: Kidlink Board, Kidlink, Kidlink Italia, (159+ members) Kidlink Catala (22+) and Kidlink Russia (42+) They are all active.
  • We have not succeeded with our Kidlink Twitter account, with Drupal forum and Youtbue video projects. 
  • We are using FB as tool to promote Kidlink and its projects. We realized that many people prefer not only to  get news but also communicate via chat or comments in FB.
  • The Board used https://groups.google.com/group/kidlink-board for its email dialog and FB Board group.
  • All Kidlink Association members are registered to https://groups.google.com/group/kidlink-association. All the Board meeting minutes were shared through this group.
  • There are 4764 subscribers in the Kidlink Official Announcement Listserv list (20131214). We have sent 4 announcement emails to our Kidlink listserv list advertising about projects and formerly others about becoming members, sponsors and volunteers.
  • We have two chat rooms open in Skype: “KA-BOARD” for the Board and “Kidlink Project Dialog” for project dialogs.
  • Kidlink has an official email, info (at) kidlink.net maintained previously at www.networksolutions.com. Info (at) kidlink.org has been used by people for cooperation requests. All alerts from among others Kidspace are sent to this email.
  • 795+ comments have been written in Kidspace.
  • Kidcom chat rooms: we have decided to close this service as it has not been used as a tool for dialog. We have not had time to improve this dialog nor monitor its activity.
  • Kidmail has been closed as it has not been used by Kidspace members.

The Kidlink Site and site visibility online

  • Addresses like http://www.kidlink.org/kidspace/start.php?HoldNode=27308 are not easy to share. URL alias are something we must continue to work on.
  • We are working on a new Kidspace with a object oriented php, a simplified registration management system and a more easily controlled permission system.
  • Adults who log in our management system in drupal will be authomatically logged in to Kidspace. Students will continue to login through Kidspace.
  • We still need to get Kidlink more visible on search engines. We are working on a new version of Kidspace where each page will get a unique title and description, thus enhancing the visibility on search engines. We hope to have this up and running, during 2014.
  • We have not been able to create a Kidspace with a "Responsive design" during 2013. We have this ambition in the new version of Kidspace.

Privacy and Security

  • We didn't find any programming expert, volunteering for Kidlink together with Stellan Kinberg. Stellan worked alone managing and adapting the Kidlink server, site and database.

Registration  

  • Stellan has created a script to allows teachers to register a whole class at once with one csv file. It can be used only by approved teachers. This classroom registration means that the students are not required to answer the 4 registration questions. In the database it is easily readable that the student has been registered by a registered teacher. Information about the registration is sent to info@kidlink.net. This method simplifies for teachers to participate in our projects. We hope with this alternative registration to get more teachers and students participating in Kidlink projects.
  • Since 1/1 2013, 48+ adults joined Kidlink.
  • Since 1/1 2013 553+ students joined the Kidlink project.

 Language areas

  • Only the Catalan area has been updated now and then as there are some running projects in Català. Many Kidlink projects are still available in Italian or spanish .

Youth Engagement

  • We have not been able during 2013 to engage youth in the management of Kidlink.

Collaboration

  • The collaboration between Kidlink and ICollaboratory has continued during 2013 with the "Moon over us" project.

Projects

  • Projects are promoted on the main drupal site www.kidlink.org/drupal by a calendar with specific dates and links to information. They are also promoted via Facebook, email, educational websites and (rarely) Twitter.
  • About participation to the projects during this school year: a large number of students and teachers took part in Kidlink projects during 2012-13. They have been involved in "Alphabet International" "ECards", "Diamond Poema", "Landmark Game", "I describe me, you draw me", "Acrostics", "Moon over us" .
  • During the projects students shared very significant pages with images and texts and they developed good relationship with their pairs writing many acomments. Teachers were very efficient in approving the students' comments in a short time, allowing so a profitable and frequent communication. 14/12 2013, 795 comments have been sent in Kidspace during 2013.
  • Newspaper lead by Larisa is the "Kidlink News" project. She works with a small team of Russian students who post their articles and the ones that they receive from schools around the world. California and Spain.
  • Communication during the project: Teachers use more often private email, FB or Skype to communicate with coordinator.
  • We have created a chess page in the hope to get chess-playing classrooms to Kidlink.