Annual Report 2014 and Annual plan 2015

We have decided to join the two documents into one. This makes it hopefully easier and faster to read.

Kidlink Association

Established 2013/12/30

Content

 

 

 

 

The Board have meetings every months starting the first Saturday in asynchronous mode and ending the second Saturday in Skype Board chat.

The Board will continue its dialog in the private Board group in Facebook https://www.facebook.com/groups/ka.board.

 

Further efforts must be made to get more members to the Kidlink Association and to get more donations. Project like “Dove for Peace “has been run in private Facebook groups. We have seen that we can reach new schools and teachers with our project with Facebook groups. With these “Facebook driven projects” we achieve a good teacher dialog but not a youth dialogue.  A working Kidlink Project depends on the support of paying members. We must emphasize that membership does not mean time consuming meetings. Members are allowed to participate in the Annual meeting but do not need to do so. We must try to get members among those teachers who are active in our projects.

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We need more Kidlink volunteers.  Several of us are 50+ so we need more young teachers volunteering in Kidlink. One important way to get more volunteers, is to get more teachers involved in our projects. as said above, Facebook is a successful tool were we reach many new schools and teachers. 

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We will continue our teacher dialog in https://www.facebook.com/KidlinkProject many teachers appreciate this group as a forum  We will continue to manage Facebook groups in several languages.

We have a Twitter account. The use of it, will be improved.

We did not succeed to move our Google group dialog to our Drupal Forum. Because of problems with Kidpace we give Drupal Forum a low priority. email alert system must be enabled so we get alerted when someone writes in the forum. 

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. 

 

 

 

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.”

 

The Boards view about dialogue among the youth of the world”

Dialog is where two or more people listen or read each other and learn about each other. A dialog among the youth can be done in several ways. Kidlink has during 2014 developed two sort of dialogs: 

electronic telecommunication dialogs were 

the youth publish their work and write comments and feedback in Kidspace 

or DO and post video messages in private project groups in Facebook. See eg the project “Doves for Peace” documented in Kidspace.

Other forms of dialogs were youth create paper works and write messages on them and send these  with ordinary post . See eg the project Doves for Peace that has been documented in Kidspace.

 

 

Kidspace offers students to create pages by themselves where they can show their works  (drawings, texts, animated slides, movies…) to everybody (parents, relatives, friends…) and not only to their teachers and also get international feedbacks

Students can do this from home and 

teachers have the possibility to monitor their students’ works getting alert emails..

With Kidspace, the students can interact individually  writing comments on the other students pages 

Students working in Kidspace can enhance basic life and curriculum related skills like interpersonal communication skills , empathy, cooperation as well as 

improve their  writing skills :  Writing for different audiences and purposes: to inform, to express personal ideas online is an important skill that are also emphasized in many countries language curricula. Kidlink can with Kidspace, help teachers around the world, to  work with these skills with interesting and motivating project topics.

But The Board  wonders  however  if the students (and teachers) are really  interested to create and publish their works on our server (that is kidspace) and if they are interested in writing and receiving feedback from project  peers and do this by themselves from eg their home.s. Dialog customs have changed with Facebook, Instagram and other media. Kidspace may not be that exciting anymore for our youth. We see salso a lack of interest in working on the dialog part of the Kidspace based project . Many schools limit themselves to publish their  the students text and works and let their students just write nonsense short feedback messages like “Nice”.” Well done” or similar. 

While many teachers work well though Facebook we have therefore difficulties to get teachers and students to use Kidspace in a appropriate way. Should we abandon Kidspace? 

Publishing works and dialogs through Kidspace is  however very important for Kidlink to sell its projects. Closed Facebook goups doesn’t help us show our projects on Internet nor does allow a electronic Youth dialog.

 

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. 

 

With the new Kidspace, now called “Space“that Stellan has been working with since december 2013. all pages will get specific title and description tags. This will make Kidlink and its projects more visible on search engines. Page editors are requested to write title and descriptions for their pages that will be read by Google and published in search results. 

We hope to get a "Responsive design" for Kidlink sites in 2015. This has not however the highest priority. 

 

Kidlink has run the Kidlink Newspaper project on a Wordpress CMS on www.kidlink.net 

The Board  has decided to migrate this project to Kidspace: This will be done during 2015

 

 

the experience of Doves of peace in https://www.facebook.com/groups/1526925430875155/ shows us a new way in carrying out projects.We will continue to use Facebook private groups as a comunication tool for teachers interested in our projects. We have had continuous interaction during 2014 and the many activities have been displayed by teachers in fb with photos and video. Through these groups we can maybe invite teachers and students to participate and organize Skype video conferences and Skype chat. We continue to support project like “Doves for Peace” were students create art and send these with messages through snail mail.

 

We are looking on how we can use these Google tools for our projects. The Moon project has successfully used this and we are studying how we can use this system maybe in 2015. . We have seen that many teachers are used to Google apps.

Wordpress blogs for our youth in Kidspace?

Mobile apps.

no matter what tool we use, we should  also focus on project guidance, how the leader keeps the activity alive - not easy and very time consuming. In my projects I spend a lot of time trying to promote dialog and interactions among the participants - some respond, some do not. But I think the participants feel more attached when someone is talking to them throughout the project - might consider trying to enlist  "helper" teachers to work alongside the main project leader, to provide a bit of ownership and to maybe bring that teacher on board later as a member.

 

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. Not to forget the huge Google plus.

Pinterest is also an important social media. The account http://www.pinterest.com/kidlinkp  was created  by Joyce in 2014. and has got among others  4 followers with 47 likes. Instagram seems to be widely used in Europe.

The social media world is not limited to Facebook. We can not be everywhere. But we must stay updated with the social media world and will study these alternative more closely during 2015 asnd maybe find how we can deal with this variety of options. Twitter edu chats are big in USA. we have to follow this and develop our twitter participation.

 

 

 

We are having a hard time to find good youth leaders, willing to help out with the youth committee and in the board. We do not want to abandon this project but hope to find youth leaders during 2015

We plan to find a teacher-mentor for youth group, as this is the only way to achieve this goal.

 

 

 

Kidlink has during 2014 managed projects that have been 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. 

 

We will continue our work with Multicultural calendar (MCC) and Multicultural recipes as a combined project.  We will also develop “The Kidlink Newspaper

 

Kidlink Newspaper does not work well on the www.kidlink.net wordpress sise. We will continue to work out thow we can migrate its content to kidspace 

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

Projects in ICollaboratory (http://www.icollaboratory.org/) will most probably become Kidlink projects during 2015.

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” during 2015