Annual Report 2016 and Annual Plan 2017

Annual Report 2016 and Plan 2017

NB. text taken from report 2016 and plan 2017
As suggested by the Board and to be voted upon at the Annual Meeting 2017.

2016. The Board members 2016 are listed in  http://www.kidlink.org/drupal/board_2016 The Board had meetings every month starting the first Sunday in asynchronous mode and ending the second Sunday in Skype Board chat at about 14 gmt.

Plan for 2017. The Board will continue its dialog in the private Board group in www.facebook.com/groups/ka.board.

2016. Kidlink Association had positive numbers partly thanks to money received from Kidlink Society. We tried to get more members with lower fees for low income countries

Plan for 2017. Further efforts must be made to get more supporting members to the Kidlink Association and be safe in a positive balance.

2016. We need more Kidlink volunteers.  We succeeded getting a few teachers volunteering in Kidlink. Many new teachers from Sri Lanka are interested in participating in our projects. We have been in touch with a few of them who could become kidlink volunteers.

Plan for 2017.  We 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 member, each board member  must find and spend  some time to help out answering email help requests, participating at Board meetings, preparing Annual meetings etc.

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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.

2016. We did no work with our vidoe channel http://www.youtube.com/user/KidlinkProject.

We kept the Kidlink dialog active in Facebook Italian, Russian, Scandinavia , Catalan. We added Facebook SriLanka.

Plan for 2017. We will continue our teacher dialog in https://www.facebook.com/KidlinkProject.  We will continue to manage Facebook groups in several languages.

We continue with our video project on http://www.youtube.com/user/KidlinkProject if we find a volunteer willing to help our with it.

We will continue to keep the Kidlink dialog active in Facebook Italian, Russian, Scandinavia , Sri Lanka and Catalan and in the main group.

2016. Kidlink Association has during 2016 worked with two sort of dialogues:

1. electronic telecommunication dialogues

like in the project "Finish my Story", "Diamond poem" and

'I describe me, you draw me,''  the youth publish their work in Kidspace. We got many youth feedbacks with comments and questions regarding the projects.

Schools also  posted  video messages and photos from classrooms in private project groups in Facebook. See eg the project “Doves for Peace” documented in Kidspace.

Skype video meetings have been organized during many of our projects.

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.

2016 Stellan Kinberg has because of health problems not been able to continue his work making Kidspace a more intuitive and manageable CMS. Old Kidspace still works however and has been used in several projects. It is however vulnerable to injection, something that has been tried by a hacker during 2016 without making any damage. We have not been able to eliminate the injection vulnerability.  We have a certificate error  on kidspace nodes with https url. Our Drupal cms is still working well and we keep all project information in this CMS. We have worked with Moodle as a cms alternative to Kidspace. We have not found a easy way to keep public access pages in Moodle.

Plan for 2017 We continue our work to make Kidspace more secure and solve the  certificate error a problem.  Our work with Moodle continue with the help of Bonnie, Terry and Joyce and we try to find a way to have selected pages public accessible without login. It is important we can make examples of good works and info pages public available to interested schools and teachers and search engines.

2016. We had a great success with  "Doves of peace".  Many countries all over the world participated. The dialog  this year has  taken place in the private group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/1526925430875155/.  We will continue to use Facebook private groups as a communication tool for teachers interested in our projects. We have had continuous interaction in Facebook during 2015 and 2016.  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.

2017. 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 communication, I.E. Creating works with  google drive and sharing them in Kidspace.

2016. 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.

Plan for 2017. But we must continue to stay updated with the social media world and will study these alternative more closely during 2017 and 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.

2016. 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.

2017. We will not put more efforts in finding good  youth leaders as it is now.. But the board thinks  that if we can get our old Kidlink Newspaper project alive again, we could again hope to find new youth leaders.

2016. During 2015/16 Kidlink managed projects that were run in Kidspace(and in FB groups) like DD, Where do I live?, Finish my Story, What’s my number?   and projects like Doves for Peace and Landmark Game that have been run in private groups in Facebook. Managers have documented part of the Facebook work in Kidspace.

2017.

The Moon project in collaboration with Icollaboratory with Bonnie will hopefully be tested on Moodle.

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

We want new art competitions in KidArt and  to run Doves for Peace project.

We have some projects running also in Italian and in Catala, and they are supported by their FB groups.  We can launch every year one/two projects in these languages too.

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”