Annual Report - Report 2010

KA Annual Meeting 2011

Annual Report 2010

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 2011, the Document will be made public from the Kidlink Association main page (http://www.kidlink.org/kidspace/start.php?HoldNode=26767)

• Kidlink Association Financial Report 2010 is sent as a separate document.

• The Board had 5 ordinary Board meetings during 2010 and the Minutes have been shared with the members in the Kidlink Association Google group.
• The Board had also several informal meetings in Skype.
  

• We have not succeeded to get more KA members and individual sponsors. During 2010 we had 31 members.
  

• We used Google groups to promote the dialogue between leaders and teachers.
• The Board used https://groups.google.com/group/kidlink-board for its email dialog
• All Kidlink members are registered to https://groups.google.com/group/kidlink-board  All the Board meeting minutes were shared through this group.
• When a teacher registers to Kidlink he/she is registered to https://groups.google.com/group/kidlink. There are now 507 members in this group. At least two projects were coordinated in this group. Mardela school USA, Colegio Sagrado Coracao and Campinas from Brazil coordinated and got a very intensive comment dialog in the nodes created. The dialogue has been not always regular but this depends on our involvement too.
• We removed all the different Kidcom chat rooms and kept just one, that we linked from the main menu. This has not been enough to achieve a chat dialog. Several youth members tried to use Kidcom, sending greetings, but only a few very short dialogs are documented in the log. Some ask in kidcom for kidmails with messages like “if you can see this message, Kidmail me”
• We have seen that several of our students are using kidmails to get in touch with each others. There have been several youth dialogs through kidmail.
• There are 4979 subscribers in the Kidlink Official Announcement Listserv list. We have sent 13 announcement emails to our Kidlink listserv list advertising about projects and lately about becoming member, sponsors and volunteers.
• We had three chat rooms open in Skype: “KA-BOARD” for the Board, “Kidlink Systeam” for the system dialog and “Kidlink Project Dialog” for project dialogs.
• Kidlink has an official email, info@kidlink.org maintained at www.networksolutions.com to be renewed November 29 2012. The Kidlink Association email is ka@kidlink.org. Info@kidlink.org has been used by people for cooperation requests.
• We have talked about an international Kidlink Conference in Chicago next year. This dialog has just started.
• All key documentation like login and pw is kept by the Chairman and the Deputy Chairman.
  

• The Kidlink domain www.kidlink.org is hosted at www.networksolutions.com and has to be renewed January 04, 2015.
• The Kidlink Site is running with a 1536 account at www.linode.com
• A new 512 account has been bought at www.linode.com to prepare for a migration of Kidspace to Ubuntu 10.10 LTS.
• We tried the CMS Drupal (www.drupal.org) during the summer 2010 at http://kdrupal.simonetwork.net/drupal6. Different themes, services like forum, chat rooms, blog and books have been tested. The Board believes in this solution and continues its efforts to built a new Kidlink site based on Drupal.
• We have a new youth system team member, HarisV, that is helping us with Drupal. He is actually working on http://www.kidlink.net/drupal7
• We have worked to make it easier to navigate our site. A lot of efforts have been done to improve the main menu. The older systems  http://www.kidlink.org/registration, http://www.kidlink.org/kidcom  and http://www.kidlink.org/kidmail have got similar head menus.
• Many of the not working links to Kidlink in Google have been removed.
• Visibility on Search Engines has been improved updating titles and descriptions. We have not succeeded in getting specific titles and descriptions for every node.
• The about pages have been completely rewritten and reorganized.
• Node 1 has become the main www.kidlink.org page. It has been updated several times during the year.
• According to Webmaster tools, the four most clicked pages during November and December were:

1. www.kidlink.org/KIDPROJ/MCC/  (linked to Multicultural Calendar)
2. www.kidlink.org (Kidlink main page)
3. www.kidlink.org/kidspace/start.php?HoldNode=15853 (a WAI student presentation from 2003)
4. www.kidlink.org/kidspace/start.php?HoldNode=27068 (Lejlas Geometry Page)

• Every user must be able to set the visibility of his/her nodes and pages. We have not been able to achieve this.
• As requested by the Swedish Computer Board Inspection we ask all registrants to approve our Privacy Policy before they register. We inform how personal data are kept in our database, the purposes of keeping them there and how to contact us if they want to change the personal data.
• Only registered and logged in users are able to search users and read their profiles. As before, only moderators are able to kidmail students.
• We have updated our Registration Handbook. We have done our best to approve only those registrants, who are what they claim to be. The 4 registrations questions help us in this work.

• Since 1/1 2009 we got 431 adults. We got 130 new teachers in the Kidlink Project between 1/1 2010 and 14/12 2010.
• Since 1/1 2009 we got 1492 new students. We got 536 new students in the Kidlink Project between 1/1 2010 and 14/12 2010.
• We got several robot registrations. After a change in the registration php’s this has stopped.
  

• We have Italian, Català, Swedish, Spanish areas with moderators taking care of the areas. Not all areas work in the same way and with the same regularity.
• We have tried to keep the language area pages dynamic to attract more readers.
• We have not succeeded to activate the Kid Centers.

• LejlaC, our youth representative has been very active during our Board meetings, suggesting improvements in our services, to attract more students to Kidlink.
• HarisV, another student of Stellan, has been engaged in the Drupal project suggesting css changes and helping with installations.

• About participation to the projects during 2009/2010: 8 schools in WAI: 80 students from Brazil, 15 from Russia, 18 from Italy, 11 from Mexico, 64 from USA. Chi Sono Io (CSI) : 40 students from Italy. I Describe my self and you Draw me (D/D) 2 schools, 40 students from Italy and USA. KidArt Competition: 33 students. Landmark Games (LG): 71 school teams  from all over the world. Hunt for Country Capitals (HfCC):  25 school teams  from all over the world.
• Projects recently updated are: Rights (English and Italian), Online worlds (Italian)
• Working Projects are: D/D, Landmark Game, Hunts for Country Capitals, WAI, Rights, Alphabet International, Online worlds, Ecards. Acrostic (Català), Feliz Navidad (Spanish),  KidArt  Competition.
• LG and HfCC run in Kidlink, but no works are presented in the site. The participants are many, but they communicate only with the Kidproj mailing list. Their students don't seem to be registered in Kidlink. Only their teachers are.
• The Board approved to start a cooperation with ICollaboratory. We planned to start our cooperation running ECards together but this has not been done yet. We had a classroom meeting in Skype by voice between a ICollaboratory class in Illinois and Stellan’s students; Haris, our systeam member, was one of them.
• Epi and Domenico support the Project Committee, but we didn’t find new volunteers.

• Work has been done to make projects more and more easier and interesting to participate in with new information, new layout and features. We have updated instructions and help pages in Italian, English and Spanish.   
• On September we updated all projects pages with new deadline and instructions, then we sent advertising through this website http://www.didaweb.net/informa (for Italian schools only) and through our Kidlink Google Forum and Kidlink mailing list (Listserv)
• We organized an International jury and promoted one competition in Kidart (See http://www.kidlink.org/kidspace/start.php?HoldNode=27641 )  But we haven’t yet found a coordinator for this area.
• We restructured and resized “Rights” in English and Italian with new Resources. Luis is working for Spanish.
• We have not been able to find a solution to allow youth to update in a safe way, their images in ShowCase and Gallery.