Annual Report 2015 and Plan 2016

Annual Report 2015 and Plan 2016

We have decided to join the two documents into one. This makes it hopefully easier and faster to read.
Kidlink Association
Established 2015/12/31
Content
 
 
 
 
2015. The Board had meetings every month starting the first Saturday in asynchronous mode and ending the second Saturday in Skype Board chat.
Plan for 2016. The Board will continue its dialog in the private Board group in www.facebook.com/groups/ka.board/
 
2015. Kidlink Association had negative numbers the last two years. We tried to get more members in our large  teacher community.
Plan for 2016. Further efforts must be made to get more supporting members to the Kidlink Association and get back to a positive balance.
2015. We need more Kidlink volunteers.  We did not succeded getting new teachers volunteering in Kidlink.
2016.  We must continue our efforts to get more Kidlink volunteers. We ask our Kidlink Association members for help with this. As more volunteers are needed we can not afford to have a Board that can not help  running the Kidlink Project administrative tasks.  By being and becoming a Board membereach board member  must find and spend  some time to help out answering email help requests, participating at Board meetings, preparing Annual meetings etc.
Aofa Article 3 says about Kidlink Association “Its purpose is to promote a global dialogue among the youth of the world. The Association emphasizes electronic telecommunications, but also supports communications in other forms and media. The Association emphasizes electronic telecommunications, but also supports communications in other forms and media.”
 
Plan for 2016. We will continue our teacher dialog in https://www.facebook.com/KidlinkProject.  We will continue to manage Facebook groups in several languages.

We will continue our efforts with our video project on http://www.youtube.com/user/KidlinkProject

We will continue to keep the Kidlink dialog active in Italian, Russian and Catalan in Facebook. 
With help cf Bonnie Thurber and Stellan Kinberg we are trying out Moodle http://www.kidlink.net/moodle/  to see if this  can become a good Kidlink tool.
 
 

2014. Kidlink Association has during 2015 worked with two sort of dialogs: 

1. electronic telecommunication dialogs
like in the project "Finish my Story" and 
'I describe me, you draw me,''  the youth publish their work in Kidspace. The youth feedbacks with comments have been few.
schools slo  posted  video messages and photos from classrooms in private project groups in Facebook. See eg the project “Doves for Peace” documented in Kidspace.
2. paper and mail dialogs:
In the same  project "Doves for Peace". .Youth created paper works, wrote messages on them and sent these  with ordinary post  to other participating schools.
 
 

The Board suggests therefore that Stellan should continue to work to make Kidspace easy to work with and to get a registration and comment administration system that is easier to manage. 

 
2015: We have not been able to continue the Kidlink Newspaper work on Kidlink.net
2016. As it looks now the project Kidlink Newspaper will be discontinued.
 
2015. We had a great success with  "Doves of peace".  Many countries all over the world participated. The dialog  this year has  taken plcae in the private group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/1526925430875155/.  We will continue to use Facebook private groups as a comunication tool for teachers interested in our projects. We have had continuous interaction in Facebook during 2015.  The many activities have been displayed by teachers in FB with photos and video. Through these groups we invite teachers and students to participate and organize Skype video conferences and Skype chat.
 
2016. We continue to support project like “Doves for Peace” were students create art and send these with messages through postal mail.  We keep our eyes open for other tools for comunication, I.E. Creating works with  google derive and sharing them in Kidspace.
 
8. Other Social networks
2015. Not all students and teachers are using Facebook. in Russia for example https://vk.com and http://www.odnoklassniki.ru/  are very popular and growing.  Google plus is also very active.
Pinterest is also an important social media. The account http://www.pinterest.com/kidlinkp  was created  by Joyce in 2014. and is being used by  4 followers with 47 likes. Instagram seems to be widely used in Europe. Padlet is also widely being used for sharing work.  The social media world is not limited to Facebook. We can not be everywhere.
2016. But we must continue to stay updated with the social media world and will study these alternative more closely during 2015 asnd maybe find ways deal with this variety of options. Twitter edu chats are big in USA. We have to follow this and develop our twitter participation.
 
 
 
2015. We are still having a hard time finding good youth leaders, that are willing to help out with the youth committee and in the board meetings.
2016. We must continue our efforts to find good  youth leaders.
We continue to look for  a teacher-mentor for youth group, as this is the only way to achieve this goal.
 
 
 
2015. During 2015 Kidlink managed projects that were run in Kidspace like Acrostics and projects like Doves for Peace that have been run in private groups in Facebook. Managers have documented part of the Facebook work in Kidspace. 
 
2016. We will continue our work with Multicultural calendar (MCC) and Multicultural recipes as a combined project.
The Moon project in collaboration with Icollaboratory with Bonnie will hopefully be tested on Moodle.
 

We continue our work with "WAI" and "Grandmother and me" . With these two projects we can offer important discussion questions.

We want to support and improve our new Kidlink Newspaper. We want it to become the Voice of Kidlink.

We want more art competitions in KidArt. and  to run Doves for Peace project.
We have enough projects running in Italian. Even if  we don't have  enough volonteeers who can update and coordinate the Italian area, we can launch every year one/two Italian projects. 
The Catala group will continue its successful work. 
We will create video tutorials on our youtube channel,  like "How to make Kidlink work for you”