International Education Week Guide

Hi guys! I hope all of you are doing good, and enjoying your life back in your own city. Ready to give back to your society for the first time? Awesome, so as you know, we all have agreed upon your reorientation in Jakarta that your batch project is International Education Week. To refresh your memory what the project is, I’ll give you a little summary.

First the goal of this project is simply to find a simple and easy way to give back to your communities. Considering most of you are all undergoing the last year of your high school, in which you will become very busy and have very little time to do a big and complicated project, we decided to do a series of presentation about your host country, host families, host school, and other great experience that you have to the nearest community in your area. It could be a kindergarten, elementary school, your own highschool, Taman pendidikan Al quran, persekutuan remaja gereja, or any other communities. You will go there with all your props and just share about your experience, I’m sure once you started telling them something, they will ask endless question afterwards, and you won’t even realize that you have talked for hours.
Now the detail stuffs. Follow this steps before you do the presentation:

1. Decide whether you chapter will work together as a group, small groups, or work individually.
Talk to your friends in your chapter (if there are any). This presentation can be done by all the form that I just mentioned. You can be as creative as you want, or as simple as you want. So it’s ok whether you want to just sit down and chat, or you want to do games during your presentation.
2. Make an arrangement with a community.
It may looks and sounds complicated but it’s important and not that hard. Basically you need to ask permission to the principal of the school, or to the leader of the organization that you want to give a presentation to. It’s very important so that you can do your presentation freely by knowing that you have the permission to do so. So you need to go directly to the leader of the community and introduce yourself, who you are, what was your program about, why you want to do the presentation, and a little bit about what you are going to talk about. Piece of cake!

3. What to talk.
During your presentation I suggest you to balance what you talk about between your fun time like road trip to disneyland, your first snow, your school activities, or your first american party and your insightful and meaningful experience. For example I personally always tell a story of how my host family postpones their dinner time during ramadhan to wait for the sundown. They usually have dinner at 5p.m but because the sun hasn’t down yet they always wait until 8.30 pm so that they can have dinner together with me. This story always fascinates my friends, so find your own story.

4. Presentation preparation.
Again you can do this presentation as you like.

• Power Point presentation is good but make sure it’s effective. How? Put as many picture as you can, and less writing as possible.
• If you have a lot of slides but it seems like the time is running, and yet people are still asking, answer them first. It doesn’t matter if you don’t finish your power point slide by the time your time is up, but make sure that your audience’s curiousity is fulfilled.
• If you don’t want to use a power point slide, it’s ok. You can bring your stuffs that you get from your host country such as flags, year book, pictures, etc.
• Pictures are powerful, so if the place where you do your presentation doesn’t have an LCD projector, try to bring your printed pictures or bring a laptop so you can show them your pictures.

5. Take GOOD PICTURES.
Again pictures are important, so make sure that when you do the presentation you bring someone to take picture during your presentation. Take pictures when you do games, or when you ask someone to come forward to point where Texas is. A little tips, try to take as many picture of people as possible, zoom on their face, their laugh, their curious faces, etc.

6. Report, Report, Report
After you finish your presentation, it’s time to share it with the rest of the world. Here is the format for your report:

1. It must an article typed and written in English (don’t worry, we’ll help you edit it)
2. Put your name, your host country, year of exchange, and the state where you were hosted on top of the paper.
3. Make a good title to catch the attention of your reader. Highlight a specific moment in your presentation, for example “ Are all Americans white? A presentation by YES Alumni in Surabaya”.
4. Be specific, tell us where and when you did your presentation, a little profile of the place where you give presentation to, and some of the most interesting moment that happen during your presentation, funny question that they ask, or some of the skepticism that you encounter, or any other interesting stories.
5. DON’T put your pictures into your word document. Instead, attach them in your email.
6. Give description to your pictures. How to do that? Open your pictures using on your computer or laptop using windows photo viewer -> right click on your picture -> choose property -> write your description in the comment section.
7. Send your article and attach your picture to ina.binabud.iyaa@afs.org and CC it to Kak Nisa Permatasari nisa.permatasari@afs.org before October 28 2012

That’s it, once your article is edited we will upload it to IYAA blog and we will make sure to let you know you, we will tweet it to YES program International so all alumni in other countries can read it too. So don’t forget to join YES Alumni Indonesia blog. You can share your story to your host family back in your host country and to your friends. If you have any question just post in the comment seection below.
Good luck guys, make yourself proud, because we already are!
Cheers!