14th "Meeting"

Haha, exams are really brutal. I missed last week.
But anyways, on the 13th, we had the last "meeting" of the year.
In actuality, I asked my members to not come
and I instead talked and thanked my sponsor teachers.

With that, this completes my Skills hours by EXACTLY 6 months and a day.

I've learned a lot by managing a club,
and I feel that I've acquired important skills.

13th Meeting

Unfortunately, on this meeting's day there was a bunch of other stuff happening. The meetings have died down a little bit since all it was about was what members were going to write about. I think my members know what to do already.

There are 2 members I'm a bit worried about though. The same people didn't update in time, and it's been them for the whole time we've been doing this. I remind them and try not to be someone who constantly hunts for them everytime they miss a day, but at the same time I feel that I should have been more assertive towards them.

It's almost the end of the year and I've talked to them, so that's all I can do, really.
At least for the next school year I know what I'll need to improve on.

12th Meeting + Inside look

Not much happened during the week. We met in the library again and the meeting was about was making sure that the members knew what to write about.

So I thought I'd take the time to show you a few things about the club.

 This is where the meetings normally take place. Over the last two weeks we had to meet in the school library because of a tapestry signing event and for another busy thing happening with the sponsor teacher.

Haha, you can see my backpack and books.

I have pictures of most of my members, but I'm not sure whether or not they would be okay with their picture being on the internet. As well, my folks have a thing about me getting my picture taken/seen by people they (and possibly I) don't know.

So here is the picture of the room we use.

Since it's an info-tech room full of computers (yeah, they're not the newest, but they work great!) I'm able to show my members what our paper looks like and what happens with their articles and, when we first started, those tutorials from a while back.

Aaah... Memories.

Anyways, this room is also a vital area because, for one, it's in the busiest part of the school.

There have been many a time (well, not many, but it happened a couple of times) where I would find members who missed a meeting during lunch.

It helps a lot because then I'm able to talk to them RIGHT after the meeting, which is good since I can tell them what we did while it's still a fresh memory in mind.

Anyways, this is all I have to write about for now. The school year is almost up, meaning the meetings will start drawing to a close. I really enjoyed the year, but before I start doing the "year-end reflection" I'll keep looking forward!

10th and 11th Meeting

I felt that these two meetings should be mentioned in one post since they were somewhat related to eachother.

Anyways, the 10th meeting was on May 16th. I went to the usual room and saw that there were a lot of people; not members but other students, inside. It was really crowded and after observing a bit, I saw that it was my sponsor teacher's students who were frantically submitting a project. I waited a bit and not many members showed up; I think at most there were two, so I talked to those members and the meeting was done.
It turns out that the members thought there would be no meeting since the room was so crowded. Seeing that the room would be crowded again for something very important in the school, I told them to meet me in the library for the next two meetings. I'm glad I did that since the room did turn out to be crowded the next week.

The 11th meeting was then held in the library on May 23rd. When I entered the library and saw my members, I had great news! You see, the day before, I went to the library and signed out two, very good digital cameras. It was perfect timing as well since on the 23rd we had a carnival in our school. When I showed them the cameras, I assigned one to one of my members to take pictures of the event happening inside our regular room (the event that made us move into the library was for a sick teacher) and the other to a member for taking pictures of the carnival. She gave it to her sister, who I personally know, and she took pictures of the carnival for us in the evening.
So far, article wise, I'm very proud of majority of my members. There are a few; who are very trustworthy and hardworking in their own ways, who haven't submitted articles on time. I've talked to them, so hopefully they'll be able to catch up for this week.

I'm still very proud of the paper and the members nonetheless.

9th Meeting

It was really eventful on the 9th!
One member that was gone for the other few meetings came back; she was sick,
so I updated her on the things that we were able to do over the past couple of months.
She's going to be doing an advice column for the paper, so that'll hopefully attract a lot of attention in our school.

There are other meetings happening in the school on Thursdays
so some members haven't been able to attend some meetings.
But thankfully, majority of them have Facebook so I've been keeping them up to date with it.

Lately I've been really promoting the paper as well.
I've sent e-mails to teachers whom I'm close with,
tweets to some teachers that have lots of followers in the school,
and I even posted stuff on Facebook.
I requested that the school website has the paper there as well,
and right now the site is under maintenance.
So I hope that's a good sign.

I really want this paper to be popular among our school.
It will, for one, voice out all the members' opinions
and at the same time it will pressure them to keep up with things.

That's all I have to say about last meeting.
I can't wait for next Thursday!

8th Meeting

May 2nd, 2013.

It was a great meeting day today! Everyone was pumped since we were able to get a lot of page views! We had about 60, if I can remember correctly.

On this meeting, we decided to break our "one-article-per-person" limits and decided to do do tons of things for the paper! Myself and one of the members are going to collaborate on a paper about the political people that came to our school on Wednesday the 1st, and that same member is going to get a short story from her friend and make a "Guest Writer" post!

As well, another member is going to write a poem and possibly something else. The other two members I have will write about entertainment; one will write about music vidoes, the other will write a review of Iron Man 3. My comic drawer is making the comic as I type, and we decided to make it a bi-weekly thing so that it's easier for her to plan/draw things out.

Everything is going very smoothly, but I can't help but be a bit worried about my task for this week. Since the member who wrote about sports doesn't want to write about it anymore, I have to fill it in. I'm not necessarily upset, since I love sports, but I might have a hard time getting things from school or from other sources since I'm not the "sport savvy" type and can hardly tell the difference from a "clean hit"  to a "bad hit" in hockey.

I'll do my best though, everyone seems to be pulling their own; if not more, weight in this club. I'm very happy I could get them involved like this.

Oh, as well, a girl did the vow of silence a long while ago, but never published her article about it. I'm happy to say that my sponsor teacher recommended that we post it anyways. It's an important issue to address, so I really hope she remembers to publish this time.

7th Meeting

Yesterday on the 25th of April, I talked about various things.
Here are the notes I made for the meeting (along with notes added after with a *)

---

Entertainment: *Iron Man 3 preview - S. D.
Sports: *Rugby Season - K. H.
Current Events: *Spirit Week - Me
Other: *Drawing/comic: Mascot comics - N. K (I'll help with ideas)
Other: *Poems/LGBT Stuff: A. W.
Mrs. P is going to put the newspaper link on the school website
COMMITMENT! We need it!
I'll ask Mrs. Painchaud to put reminders every Wednesday that there's Newspaper Club on the day after. E.g. "A reminder that tomorrow there's a Newspaper Club meeting at lunch in B111"
and on Thursdays: "Newspaper Club is meeting today at B111 at lunch".

---

That's basically what happened.
I was able to discuss all the plans for this week's edition and get people committed to the club still.
I'm really glad with what's happened so far with the club.
I know that I've been saying that I was worried that things would fall apart,
but so far they're starting to look up!

I need to remember that some members need to be reminded every once in a while,
and that not all members have phones/Facebook so I'll need to contact them personally.

But so far I'm really excited for our first, full issue!

6th Meeting

On that day's meeting, I think I came to terms with the fact that most of my members were gone.
It's sad to say, but I lost all but 4 of my members.
From 12 people to 4, it's somewhat saddening.

However, with the people I have left, I've been able to do a few things.

We have a paper on paper.li, a website that creates a virtual paper every week. The only thing is though, we need to make updates every week or else old articles will stay on there.

It'll be a challenge, but I think with these 4 it'll push through!

Here's a link!

http://paper.li/degracia_d/1366049241

Monday Meeting with Sponsor

On April 15th, I met with my sponsor teacher at lunch to discuss how to set up a certain program for the newspaper.
It was really helpful since it hotlinks all my sources and keeps them in memory so that I don't have to constantly go back and fourth to see if my sources updated or not.

Anways, this is a short post.
Tomorrow is our 6th meeting,
I hope people remember this time.

5th Meeting

This was the meeting we had two Thursdays after spring break.
At this meeting, only myself, a sponsor teacher and two other members showed up.
It was a bit saddening to see such a small amount of people show up,
but I went on with the meeting anyway, and we actually got a lot done!

We decided that this would be the week that we started posting stuff.
I need to go over something with one of the sponsor teachers,
but we were planning to post something every Sunday night/Monday morning.

We have three sections of the newspaper so far.
Sports, Current Events/Upcoming Events and Entertainment.

I actually finished my article,
and I plan to post it Sunday night.
The two people doing Entertainment are apparently watching a movie today,
and are going to review it later,
and one of my members is in the rugby team,
so she's going to talk about the game she had a few days ago.

I'm glad things are picking up now,
and I can't wait for things to really start running!

4th Meeting

This meeting was a bit short,
but very important.
On the 14 of March, I assigned everyone to do a quick assignment over Spring Break.
I did this because in a Newspaper, it's important to target important points right away.

Their assignment was to write 2 short stories over the break
while quickly targetting who, what, where, when and why
while providing a hook to your audience.

It's important practice because
on a Newspaper, if you write a super long article,
then the reader will get bored.
So at least with this,
we're practicing to grab our readers' attention
while writing important, thorough, short articles.

I'm going to be doing this assignment as well,
since I need to practice this as well.

Fitness - Badminton

I completely forgot to post about this!

In order to account for the fitness portion of the Duke of Ed. award,
some friends and I would normally go out every Friday after school and hang around our school's gym.

Now; along with that routine, I tried out for the Badminton Team of my school.
The first three tryouts were an hour and a half each, which is a good 4.5 hours,
but then I also made the team! (Woo hoo!)

Practices are going to be every Monday; unless said otherwise,
and games are going to be every Wednesday; unless said otherwise as well.

I'm very excited to join the team!
Wish me luck!

Meeting up...

A couple of days ago, my school had the Parent Teacher Interviews.
While waiting for them to start, I found my Newspaper Club sponsor teacher and talked about next meeting.

I decided that it was now time for us to post.

It'll be interesting,
and I'm a bit worried about it,
but I think that it'll turn out well in the end.

The 2nd, and 3rd Meetings

(Ah... It's hard to keep up with blogs...)

2nd Meeting:
On the 2nd meeting, I needed to collect people's e-mails for the blogs.
We also started setting up our newspaper blogs and some people were able to add their urls to my page.
We did this so that when people start reading my blog,
their blogs will be seen along with any of their posts.
We also set up new Twitter accounts with our surreyschools e-mails.
We needed those Twitter accounts so that we could apply tweets to a certain program
that would make a newspaper-like blog with those tweets.

That took up all of the meeting, but I still needed people's urls.

3rd Meeting:
I had to miss this meeting since I was going to a Peace Forum in a highschool nearby.
I left notes to the sponsor teacer/secretary, so here they are:

• School e-mails, twitter names and blog urls need to be collected
  (Do this at the start of the meeting please)
• Establish who will do what in the paper
       - Let members set "teams" of people.
             E.g. The "Sports Team" will have 2-3 people who would either go to games, interview
             players, talk about the game etc.
• (If any) New mwmbers should be brought up to speed
        - Have "veterans" show them what to do
• Newspaper title? Ideas?
• * Start an attendance list too (?)

As well, could you explain to me:
    - Paper.lil (How it works + how to create link/paper)
    - How we'll contact eachother/other members
       (If that's up to me, I'd prefer through surreyschool e-mails)

* Some people might be missing since they might be in the peace forum also!

** Please e-mail me anything else that you discussed so that I can bring myself up to speed. Again, thanks for covering for me! **

This is what we've been up to so far.
I'll try to improve on keeping up with my blogging from now on.

The First Meeting

So! The first meeting rolled around.
On that Thursday, I was surprised at how many people turned up.

About 12...
Not bad!
(I was honestly going to be happy if my 4 or so friends showed up.)

So, we talked, or, I talked at first.
I told them that this was my first club.
That we would all make mistakes,
and that we should have fun with it all.
And that I would make mistakes,
and that I was really awkward.
(That made them laugh a bit)

Afterwards, I asked what they want.

We got lots of amazing ideas!
Things from a comic strip to an anonymous ask,
a horoscope to an editorial,
photo of the week and teacher of the month,
it was great!

The Thursday that comes along this week,
the 2nd meeting,
they'll be showed this website that makes a digital paper
by hotlinking Tweets!

I learned this a little bit before,
with Mrs. P and I discussing lots of ideas,
but to be fair, I really want to learn them again,
(I kinda forgot a few steps...)
but I have a feeling this'll all turn out well. :)

Three cheers for the next meeting!

Preparing for the Newspaper Club

I am a member of the Duke of Edinburgh club.
A club that asks that people to have a certain number of volunteer/work experience,
a club that asks for physical hours,
a club that works on encouraging us to go on a journey of some kind on our own (with certain aquirements),
and a club that asks for each of it's members to work on a skill.

I'm doing well with volunteer hours,
and I'm slowly working on my physical hours,
and the journey will come this summer,
(wow that sounds really dramatic)
but I'm working on my skills.

Recently, I've started a Newspaper Club at my school.
And with the help of Mrs. P,
it's first meeting; in my opinion, was a success.

On preparing the Newspaper Club, I've sent lots of emails,
spread the word onto lots of interested people,
asked for any ideas,
relayed any questions,
gave back answers,
and stood to talk in front of a group of 12 or so people,
hoping for the best.

It'll be a little hard,
working on this "skill building".
But I'll try my best either way.

Let's go Newspaper Club!