What I learned during my SLP

I learned that I am a very patient person while completing my SLP. I had to contact area schools for information to put in my newsletter and some of the people were rude. They treated me as if I was a reporter or private investigator. There are so many activities going on in the community that I did not know about. I have children and I would love for them to be apart of the activities instead of being outside or just sitting home watching television or playing video games. There are activities and people in my community who actually care about the children and the community itself, that surprised me. I also never thought what I would do if my kids school closed or every had a plan for them to get acquainted with their new schools so that they would not feel so out of place on the first day. I learned that it is important to have a plan or some idea of what you are going to do to complete a particular task, rather than going in blind or being shocked or caught off guard when things don't go the way you planned. Before my service learning project I really never had this much interaction with the community and now I plan on spending my summer helping out the South Side Community Center.

Service Learning

I am partnering with New City Academy, a public charter school. The school is pretty small, it goes from kindergarten to eight grade, but the classes are small. This type of environment is key to being able to have more one on one time with students and is desired by many parents. New City Academy is a full of great students, staff, and parents, who love their school. The school has been in its location for 10 years and will be closing at the end of the school year. They are focused on nurturing and giving their children the attention they need. My project will be to complete an end of year newsletter that will include poetry from the students about change and transition. I believe the most valuable service I can offer to New City is to be committed to completing the newsletter to their satisfaction, because this is the last one the school will send out. Some students may want to keep the newsletter for memories and I will be excited and honored to be apart of the memories of the good times at New City Academy.

Service Learning Project

I am looking forward to working with my service learning partner at New City Academy. I spoke with Elaine Miles who is the office administrator. We are scheduled to meet on Thursday, March 25,2010 to start the project. I may be drafting a newsletter for the school, we talked about maybe a year end newsletter, but we have not set anything into stone. I am eager to complete this project to offer my services to my partner. My children used to attend New City Academy so I am very familiar with the staff and many of the students who attend the school. This project will be fun, because I will be able to see what fun activities or programs the school has planned. New City Academy will be closing so this newsletter is going to be very important because it will be the last one for the school, so I want to do my best work. I have some ideas that I will run by Ms Miles to see if she likes them, and I plan to get rolling on this so I want run out of time or have to feel rushed to meet deadlines.

Service Learning

From reading several articles on service learning I see it as a way to learn through doing. It seems as if it would be more exciting then traditional classroom study. I took from the article that it was a way to give back to the community while teaching civil responsibility. The high school's in Chicago, now have community service as a requirement to graduate and I think that is awesome service learning and it teaches them life-long civil engagement. Service learning should be incorporated into every school to help students understand the importance of sharing whether it be knowledge, time or love. I am excited about this project, because I have a opportunity to get out and work in the community. My only fear is that I might not be able to do certain things for the partner and me being unable to say no, might end up doing them anyhow. I will just have to make it clear in the beginning that this is a project for school and I must stick to it and not be sidetracked or talked into doing something more. Hopefully this could help with my networking and help me in the future.

Workplace Strategies and Language Choices

Being in the Public Relations field it is important to be an effective communicator. It is important to master both verbal and non verbal language that will help to convey your message. In today's world, simple communications is not enough. Companies, and associations need to know how to communicate in ways that cut through the clutter of the busy world, delivering effective messages that motivate your target audiences to action. To ensure that I make the correct language choice in the workplace, I am prepared to follow these strategies:

• I will know my purpose for speaking and master skills needed to move my audience
• It is important to act natural
• Know my audience
• Master communicating clearly and listen actively
• Keep something to take notes
• Be creative, keep an open mind
• Keep a dictionary handy
• Build my confidence
• 
  

Do's and Dont's of Social and Professional Networking

Social Networking has become the number one way to communicate nowadays. With everyone so caught up with being on top of the latest technologies, it can be damaging if you are not careful. I am a Facebooker and, I used to myspace for awhile. I don't have a twitter but I enjoy writing so one day I just might start to twit. You should always remember to use these sites with caution, because you never know who's reading what you say. There are people on Facebook who talks about everything that goes on in their lives in great detail. This is not cool, because not only can your friends see what you have on your page so can their friends. I would not recommend using these sites while at work, because the company you work for may monitor your computer use. Even with regular email, we should be cautious about things we send or say in these email, just in case they wind up in the wrong hands.

Developing Your Online Reputation (Indentity Strategies)

When developing your online reputation you need to know what message you want to send about yourself. If you want to have a professional image then start by keeping it clean and help it stay that way. It's hard to get respect back once you have lost it so why not work hard to keep the respect you have. Information that other people post on the internet can damage your squeaky clean profile and keep employers from hiring you. Managing your online reputation is just like managing your reputation out in the world. It can be tarnished by the people you associate yourself with also, because information or picture that they post of you as well could be seen by others. Be cautious of the information that you put on the web, because someone could take it and use it against you.

If there is some damaging information or some information that you are not proud of delete it as soon as possible. There are ways that you can disassociate yourself from people on these personal peer sites so if need be do so. I also read that there are ways to contact the website owners to have information removed, you could report abusive information and people. The best thing to do when on these peer sharing sites is to keep it clean do post anything that you don't want everyone to know about. Never bad mouth previous employers or coworkers because it does not say much about the type of person you are. Your image is everything it is what gets you in the door for that interview.

I do have personal sites like Myspace, and Facebook that I use to communicate with family and friends often. I was surprised by some of the things we actually put on the websites after knowing that perspective employers look on these sites. Now I am more careful and I have a lot of pictures I need to remove, I have even made my profiles private, and I set privacy settings to my pictures. It is hard work branding yourself and setting a professional image but it is all worth it in the end.