OSC Ambassadors are one of the many services here in the Overseas School of Colombo. Our goal is to make our school community feel comfortable and open up about any mental illnesses that they or anyone else may be going through. Our current focus is on new students; new students that come to our school community have little to no contact with the students and knowing some students prior to their first day will help them transition into a new environment. I hope to contribute as much as possible to our OSC community this year. We are currently focusing on how to make new students feel more comfortable in the process of transferring school. As an international school, we have many students from different countries and the transition can be quite difficult for some student. Our team this year has initiated, researched, planned and are currently working on many projects such as creating a website for our service. We are working on other videos such as a tour of our school, a video introducing all of the teachers which will be put up on the website. These videos along with the website can be visited by new students planning to transfer to our school and familiarize themselves with the school. We also have our own email where we first contact the student’s parents this allow the students and their family to communicate directly with the student counselor and the students at OSC who will help them in their transition. We also made a small poster to spread social awareness about the No Shame November. I personally have been working on my CAS Project in relation to my service. I have designed a logo and a t-shirt for the members of our service from 2019-2020. My process is further demonstrated in my CAS Project post. Some of the projects we worked on:
Planning:
First we interviewed Ms. Trisha as a group to find out what we can do and any questions we had about the procedure for the transition of any student.
Interview with Ms. Trisha (September 5th, 2019)
What is the usual procedure of the admission for new students?
First there is an application that the students have to fill out.
Then they have a test to determine their level.
After the application and test, they get a tour of the school with another staff member.
How can we reach out to them?
Create another email address dedicated for new students so they can reach out to us if needed
(Done, email address: [email protected])
Is it possible to Skype with them?
We will need to check with Ms. McQuillan if we are allowed to Skype with them.
When can we start?
As soon as possible, share all the details (mainly email address and phone number) for Ms. Trisha to send the details in the future
How many days prior to the tour day will we know about the new students?
2 to 3 days prior to the tour date, we will get all the details (including where they are from, their age, the grade they will go into)
Other Projects our team worked on: (still need to add the pictures)
(Website screenshot)
The website was designed by Aditi, Junsu, Jed, Mikhil, and Ashna
(videos Screenshot)
Social Awareness Campaign for No Shame November
Automatic e-mail made by Aditi Singh (Service Leader)
My CAS Project on T-shirts
More information available in my CAS Project Post for the T-shirts and the logo.
Learning Outcomes:
- thinking, communication, social, self management, research skills
- communication, social, research skills
This school year I joined a new service called OSC Ambassadors and our current focus is on new students; new students that come to our school community have little to no contact with the students and knowing some students prior to their first day will help them transition into a new environment. We worked on creating videos such as a tour of our school, a video introducing all of the teachers which will be put up on the website which another group also worked on. We worked on our service e-mail so new students could contact us. In the beginning of the service we brainstormed ideas for the videos and website as a group which further developed my social and communication skills. Communication is key for sharing ideas and demonstrating your own developed plans and it is important to be social when you want to share your opinions on other people’s ideas. It is also important that we as a group are able to communicate with new students because we would need to be the first to reach out and initiate the conversation. Personally, I worked on the logo and designing the T-Shirt for our service members this semester. For this project I had to do primary and secondary research. First I asked around other members from other services that had created T-Shirts to get and idea of how i should approach this project. With the information I gathered, I was able to communicate with Mr. Rajiv who ordered all the T-Shirts and understand what I had to do for my part. Social skills is mainly connected with communication as social skill tools help us communicate, discuss, ask questions etc. I had to use Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop and since I was a beginner at using this software, I used secondary sources such as tutorials online to further help me in this process. I also communicated with Taneishq as she is familiar with using this software for designing logos and t-shirts which provided me with a lot of guidance. Working collaboratively within the service group such as voting for Logo designs and getting feedback on the T-Shirt designs was also improved the final designs. Working with a new group this year further enhanced my social and communication skills and my research skills was put into practice for the project I took on.