Task 3 of the Personal Learning Plan required students to participate in a form of volunteering within and outside of the school environment. We undertook a series of tasks for volunteering and I will now reflect on my personal experience with those tasks. The first task was to do a class volunteering in which we as a class would give up our time to help a cause or help something in the community, we believed was an issue. We chose to use our innovative and creative minds to help an issue that had arisen in the NMHS senior campus. The issue was that the school had a lot of birds that sat in trees outside the school, yet there were no birdhouses or birdfeeders for them to go to at the school. Our solution was then to build creative birdhouses with the help of the NMHS Wood Technology Department to provide food and shelter for the birds that live at the school they provide us with a view and chirping music every time we are in our PLP classroom and they are in the trees outside the windows.
Our second task was to do a form of digital volunteering. For our digital volunteering we as a class decided to arrange ourselves into groups that would help the ISEC International students improve their learning in the English Language. We as a group (Jap Banga, Sivani S, and I) worked with an individual student named Cinthia to help her to improve her English through regular conversations in English via Zoom every two days to improve her ability to communicate fluently in English. We spoke about general topics such as school life, subjects, life overseas, and Covid 19 which are conversations that they will encounter when they start their international schooling experience.
I completed these tasks during this short time period by effectively planning out a schedule of the time limits I had to volunteer for each element of the volunteering. I used my time management skills and organization skills to plan out my weeks (e.g. Week 9/10 for ISEC Students, Holidays for Reflection, and Weeks 1 and 2 for the development of the birdbox) using Google Calendar based on the schedule Ms. Maywald mentioned on Teams.
The people who were involved in the volunteering included the 10EX class, our Personal learning plan teacher Ms. Maywald, the Head of the International student Body for NMHS Ms. Sarantaugas, and the Woodwork teacher on the Senior Campus Mr. Dennis. Ms. Maywald helped plan the volunteering and was a main part of assisting us with the planning and organization of these tasks that we needed to complete. Ms. Sarantaugas helped us organize the communication with the ISEC students and also helped document the process by taking pictures and videos of our chats with the students. Finally, Mr. Dennis helped with the building of the birdboxes and assisted us with any issues that had arisen, taught us how to use the machines, and overall helped us build the best birdbox possible.
The goals I set out for each of my volunteers include:
Goals:
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- To communicate and help ISEC student improve their ability to communicate in English
- To volunteer time online to build a relationship and help the ISEC students with general conversation in English
- To develop an innovative and creative birdbox/birdhouse, as a team to enhance the life of birds that live in NMHS
The goals I set were obtainable because they are goals that meet the criterion to be considered SMART Goals, therefore making them realistic and obtainable to achieve. The goals were also effectively achieved because I was able to communicate and help an ISEC student named Cinthia to improve her English since her first language is Chinese, I also built a relationship with her and we are now friends which was a goal I hoped I could achieve and finally I achieved my final goal of building a birdhouse to enhance the life of birds in the community with help from my team.
The strategies I used to obtain my goals included setting Smart goals, creating a plan of action to complete the task using Google Calendar, avoiding procrastination when it came to writing my reflection, managing my time(time management) and finally eliminating my bad habits such as being shy to speak to others via Zoom and procrastination.
A goal that could have been tweaked to support what I wanted to achieve through my volunteering was my second goal’ To volunteer time online to build a relationship and help the ISEC student with general conversation in English’, instead I could tweak it and say ’To be consistent and volunteer time into helping the ISEC student with their English to my best ability for maximum progress during our time of interaction.
The personal learning plan capabilities were important for the development of certain capabilities during this task.
A capability I developed was the personal social capability which involves developing self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and social management. It helps to develop effective life skills, including understanding and handling relationships, learning, and work. During my class volunteering, I sacrificed time to build the birdhouses and stayed after school to complete the elements of the birdhouse to the best of my ability. For my digital volunteering, I had to manage my time and make sure I had met the requirements of the interaction with the ISEC students set by our group. When interacting with the ISEC students as digital volunteers, I expanded my knowledge of social awareness.
Another capability I developed was the critical and creative thinking capability. Every volunteering activity I was involved with involved me in communicating critically and creatively. For class volunteering, we required the ability to critically think and generate creative ideas for the design of the birdhouses. We used creativity to generate an original design that was meaningful yet practical for the birds. For the digital task l, we critically formulated creative questions that were interesting to ask Cinthia, that would be similar to a question she would get at her international school.
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