Final Days

Throughout this crazy last high school year (senior) I have learned to be patient with so many things. I have this weird thing that when I have to wait for something then I get to urge to really have to go pee.  Throughout this project patience was one of the things that I had to have and developed. Working with some one like Robert helped a lot because he is a patient and more organized person than I am. He was a pretty good research person and that helped the project a lot. I am more of a hands-on person and well research is huge part to this. I don't think that without the research he did and the research he made me do this project would have been possible. The Tutoring program came out of many different ideas as you can see through my blogs. There were times where I had to read and reread a lot of things so that I can understand what Mentoring/Tutoring really is. The presentations were fun for because I enjoy speaking in front of people and this was the place where I felt comfortable and could show my hard work in. The best thing is to have an idea ready and just go with it. Our final product didn't really come until creativity week. It is a great thing to ask your teachers and talk to them about your projects because they will surprise you with their knowledge and ideas that they have. Many people in the class decided to do great things but they were too big. Many of our ideas were too big to put into action in just a year. Many of us had to readjust our schedules many times so that we can work on our senior project. It is a great experience and please do something that you are fully passionate about because if not you are stuck doing something that you are going to keep doing over and over again! I know at the beginning I wanted to do something with soccer, volleyball, tennis, and kids. I know I should've tried other things such as doing something like starting FFA for this school, or a volleyball tournament, or soccer camp.

April!One month to go!

The next step.! I still haven't found a place for the presentation. An idea came up that maybe we should combine it with the Chinquapin Alumni Association meeting which is next month in May. Robert and I are attending the meeting this wednesday which will be April 20. We will discuss our project with the Alumni since it does involve them. We have prepared a small presentation ready for the meeting on wednesday.

Planning.

This past month we have been trying to work on planning the date of our presentation with our panel. This is extremely hard because most of our panel is hard to reach. We need to have a set date and place. We are still waiting on replies for places. Our panel seems to be very cooperative but we need to get to work on getting everything planned. We have reached a bunch of places but we still haven't heard back. I know this is driving our teachers crazy because we don't have a set date and we are way past the due date to have a set date and presentation place. Hopefully everything turns out well. I will provide our TACKLE /tutoring program slide that we made.

Presentation Slide show!

February!

This month was crazy and good! This month the tutoring program has formed itself and evolved into something that will be more do-able. This month was a very busy month for this project. With the help from Susan, we discovered the way to help students virtually. We are going to use wiziq.com as a way to have Alumni tutor younger students. Whittier Elementary wants Robert and I to go back and work with the students again. It was a good week. We decided to name the project TACKLE which stands for Tutoring by Alumni Cultivating Knowledge, Learning&Education.

First Day of Creativity Week

Robert and I tried to work with wiziq.com. We launched several classes and experimented with the document sharing and screen sharing. We couldn't get one of the laptop's video chat thing to work. We talked to Francisco about giving us access to facebook so that we can create a group for our tutoring program. Facebook isn't working though for us. We will be talking to him again so that we can get these problems fixed. We sat and watched how some people did classes on wiziq.com. We attended some classes and observe how these teachers managed their classes.

WizIq..... Whats that?

Susan has came up to us with a great solution to our transportation problems and food problems. She has suggested that we do online tutoring. Online tutoring using wiziq.com, its a website that allows many members to make an account. With the online tutoring we wouldn't have to worry about feeding and transporting the students. We are thinking of having the tutors be the Alumni Association from the Chinquapin School. Coming up we have creativity week which will gives a lot of time to work on our project and master using the online tutoring. We will create an ad that will inform and invite people to use our program. The online tutoring is very tricky, we have tried it but we still have to play around with it to master it. The following is what we will be doing throughout this week.

Tuesday:
8-9 a.m: (Fan Room) We will be working on wiziq. We will try to learn about how it works, when it works best, when it is unable to work. We will need laptops.
9-11 a.m: Continue working on the wiziq. (Fan Room) We’ll take notes about the difficulties that we have.
11-12 p.m:Talk with Francisco about difficulties we have been having with wiziq.com. We’ll be in his office with the laptops.
12-1 p.m:Eating Lunch
1-3 p.m: We’ll continue working with our website. We will also be create a group on Facebook, where we will invite Chinquapin students to create their wiziq.com account. We will work on uploading our trailers and presentations to that facebook group. We will be in the Fan Room.
3-4 p.m:Blog about how the day went and how much we have done. Blog about this day to get our readers informed. (Fan Room)

Wednesday:
8-10 a.m: Practice using wiziq.com with each other. Continue jotting down the advantages and difficulties we have with this website. (Fan Room)
10-11 a.m:Research on any final difficulties that we have with wiziq.com. Figure out how to fix these. (Fan Room)
11-12 p.m: Master the usage of wiziq.com. With all of the notes that we will have written down we will create a how-to-guide, informing the alumni and students the steps of creating an account and using the website. (Fan Room)
12-1 p.m:Eat Lunch
1-2 p.m: Start thinking about what we want to say on our draft for our ad. Figure out the images we wish to use for this ad. Think about the font size. Font text. We will be in the Fan Room.
2-4 p.m: Contact our panel members and inform them how our project has changed. Ask them what date and at what time it will be the best time to meet with them for our senior presentations. (Fan Room)


Thursday:
8-9 a.m:We plan to have finishing touches on our draft to our ad. Fan Room
9-11 a.m: Once we finish our draft, we will meet with Francisco and start working on our final ad. This will take quite an amount of time to perfect our ad. Francisco’s office.
11-12 p.m: We plan to email our ad to the alumni and students. This will take a while because we need to figure out what goes where and who do they go to. We will have a paper copy to our ad to present to the students on Friday. Final touches on our FaceBook group. Fan Room
12-1 p.m:Eat Lunch
1-2 p.m:We will make sure that everything is ready for the presentation such as equipment and that our accounts are working. We will make sure we have everything we need for Friday.
2-4 p.m:We will practice our presentation for Friday. We will work on what we are going to say.


Friday:
We will show our ad that we created and briefly show students how wiziq.com works. We will need to be using a classroom. The fan room is a good place to do our presentation.

New Idea!

So a new idea came up because we were having problems with how we were going to transport the students from Houston to Chinquapin. The students will be selected from nearby schools such as Highlands Elementary and Hopper Elementary School. These students will have no problems with transportation since they live nearby. The program will be held during the summer. The student will be provided with lunch. We aren't so sure how we are going to feed them. We have been talking to people about being able to get free food for the students. We have been researching and looking at how Greg Mortenson raised money with his organization Pennies for Peace, Frank Duffy (panel member) is involve with this.

What I've Done

So far I have gotten Molly, Betsy, Dana, Rob, and Frank to become a part of my panel. Robert and I planned that each one will do something different but will have just as importance as each other. We are really excited to see how they will help us out. We scheduled an appointment with Frank last Tuesday but didn't meet with him because we weren't allowed to miss class. Now we will have to reschedule during the weekend or maybe this coming Monday. Something that Robert and I have in mind is having a time before the summer where students can actually come down to Chinquapin to get help with schoolwork and other problems. We want to know if our program will actually work out and this is one way to know if it does or not. If this doesn't work out, then we will at least know what we need to fix.