Day Three | Steemit Bootcamp for Underprivileged Kids

in #steemit7 years ago (edited)

A Day to be Grounded, Physically and Psychologically

Contents for Day 3:

  • Recap, Q&A on previous days' contents
  • Fixing citations and missing links
  • Honesty - The Trust Gap filled by the Blockchain
  • Plagiarism & the Price to Pay
  • Identifying Keywords, Paraphrasing
  • Mav's 25-25-25 Secret to Writing
  • Chunking - Up, Sideways and Down
  • Being Smart about Tags - Popularity, Relevancy & Profitability
  • Hello Grammarly
  • Hello AnswerThePublic
  • Hello The Most Dangerous Writing App
  • Prioritization, Teamwork and Too Many Cooks Spoiling the Soup

Assignment for Day 3:

  • Complete Day 3's post, work on Day 4's.
  • Continue Pixar In a Box from yesterday.

Key Learnings:

  1. One of the girls had to learn a hard lesson of being flagged by @cheetah. She copied the contents of Wikipedia for her post. Though unfortunate, it was a good opportunity to teach a valuable lesson to the class.

  2. We spoke about honesty, and how the blockchain is supposed to be bridging the gap of trust. The class was reminded to watch the earlier TED Talk by Richie Etwaru, assigned to them on Day 1. Honestly, only one of the girls watched it, and I was quite surprised that she could remember some of the highlights of the talk, and also recap her understanding on it.

  3. Coincidently, the organisers were also having a discussion with me on how to prevent the kids from withdrawing their SBDs for their personal purchases (they were supposed to pledge an percentage of the amount back to the home). My conclusion with them was simple: the kids are smart, and they have Google. Even if I don't teach them how to withdraw, they can easily Google it.

    Rather, it is easier to teach them to value of trust, honesty and responsibility, and how the blockchain logs all their transactions anyway.

  4. With the serious talk with the kids out of the way, I showed the kids how I, too, found out about them plagiarising contents from the web. I showed them Grammarly, and how on top of using it as a tool to improve their writing, but also as a plagiarism checking tool. With that, I'm glad the kids learned their lesson of not copying contents 100% off the web. That's just plain stealing!

  5. Which led me to my next point: learning how to pick up keywords in any article, and paraphrasing it. Essentially, I gave them a crash course of spinning articles, but with brains and comprehension (not with something like Spinbot).

  6. We had to backtrack a little on image linking and citing sources, which was where I taught the kids some handy Markdown languages.

  7. The first content we touched on was the concept of Chunking, which was demonstrated the day before. With a "car" used as an example, essentially:

    • Chunking Up helps identify the purpose of something, in this case a car. Everyone agreed a car is used as a means to get from Point A to Point B.
    • Chunking Sideways helps identify options and variety. For the case of getting from Point A to Point B, the kids said that instead of using a car, they can bike, fly, ride a bus, and for the adventurous Joe, even walk.
    • Chunking Down helps break down larger topics into smaller ones. In the case of the car, the kids identified the many different type of cars (sports, luxury, sedan, 4x4), different brands (Honda, Proton, Toyota, Ferrari) and different purposes (family, speed, fuel-saving).

  8. The purpose of teaching them Chunking, especially Chunking Down, is so they will not easily run out of topics to write on.

  9. I then went on to show them AnswerThePublic.com, which I suggested they use as a means to brainstorm ideas to write about. They all agreed that it is a great tool for research too.

  10. Some of the kids professed that they spent up to 3 hours creating a post, and I applaud them for their hard work. It is evident in the quality of their post. I decided to teach them something to short cut their time, by streamlining the writing process. That's where my 25-25-25 Method of Writing comes in.

  11. Essentially, the first 25 minutes is to be spent on researching on the topic. Why put a time limit? Well, if there are no time limit, anyone would be a Youtube 3 hours later, watching the trailer to Avengers 5!

    Setting a time limit focuses the mind to only look for relevant contents to write on, and to also not waste time with distractions. After every 25 minutes, it's recommended to take a 5 minute break before the next task, which is…

  12. Writing! Here, I introduced them to my old buddy, the Most Dangerous Writing App. They all took a few minutes to think of their topic, set the timer to three minutes, and started typing away. If you haven't tried this app before, check out this extended post I wrote a while back.

    But here's a nutshell of the app: Once you hit start, the moment you slow down your typing, you will notice contents you've typed fading off. Pause for too long, and the contents just disappear! No copy-and-paste, no cheating. The idea is simple: free flow writing. Screw the errors, the key to writing is to write, not to think.

  13. Some of the kids failed the first time, which is expected, but they enjoyed the process. We decided to go for round 2, but this time, it's on Hardcore Mode. A lot tougher, with all the previous rules in place and with one new, killer one - you can only see the letter you typed. The rest are blurred out!

    We did a 3 minute exercise on hardcore mode, and the funny thing is? The failure rate was much lesser, and they wrote a lot more than round 1. This showed that once the mind stop judging and correcting the contents, ideas will flow more freely.

  14. For the last 25 minute, which is Editing, I introduced them to Grammarly. Free and easy to use, the kids were quick to learn from their grammar mistakes and how to improve their overall writing.

  15. We also spent sometime to look at proper ways to Tag/Categorise the posts they did, with the focus on relevancy, popularity and profitability. I gave them the analogy of a swimming pool. High profitability means a big pool, and high popularity means how crowded the pool is. They were quick to discover that sometimes some pools may be smaller, but there are lesser people in it. Smart!

    We ran through the list of trending tags, and the kids were able to link their topics to the right tags. Personally, I was quite amazed that they were so fast in picking that up.

As I reflect back on today, though I covered a lot of tools to help them generate topics, breakdown ideas, identify profitable tags and free-flow writing, the personal one was the lesson on Trust. It wasn't planned in the schedule, rather impromptu, but the timing was write. It's always good to get the attitude right at the start, rather than correcting it later.

I am reminded of a metaphor my Ma used to drill into me when I was younger:

When trying to straighten the bamboo, do it when it's still at it's shoots. Same goes when trying to ground someone's attitude.

Check out the previous post(s) in this Steemit Bootcamp for Underprivileged Kids Series:

  • Day Zero | The lead-up and Preparation
  • Day One | Introduction to Steemit, the kids' first #Introduceyourself post, and no way a combined SBD133 of upvotes on the very first day!?!!?​
  • Day Two | Interests, Format & Structure

Wait, why's Mav posting on Steemit nowadays?

Well, unlike other blogging and social media platform, Steemit is the only platform that allows me to earn cryptocurrency when I engage with it. Yup, one Steem is about USD7, and you, too, can earn Steem Dollars every time you:

  • Create content (articles, blog posts, podcasts, videos, photos)
  • Upvote (like) other people contents
  • Comment on other people's posts
  • Have discussions, share opinions etc!

Yup, basically it's the very same thing you're doing on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc all along!

The only difference? For once you can earn a nice income on the side!

Sign up for a free Steemit account, and you can thank me by coming back and upvoting this article. And guess what, you will earn Steem too for doing that! #awesome

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wow... you are doing great work. This is inspirational. Keep doing this great work and keep inspiring us by posting it on Steemit :)

What amazes me more than your effort in helping these kids is your ability to explain these Steem-related concepts like Steem and SBD, popularity and profitability.. It reflects the high degree of understanding that you personally have over the platform and how it works!

Just trying my best. My Mom (a great teacher) tell me that you can only understand so much by learning, but when you teach, you will gain the missing puzzles needed to raise to the next level. It's by sharing it all, that you have more space to put in new things. And the funny thing is, you realise that by sharing it all, you haven't lost it at all. :)

Your mom must have been a wonderful teacher :) Well, all the best to you and the kids! Every time you document the lessons that you've taught them, it's also a lesson for me :P

Much love Mr @maverickfoo. I know what you mean. Today I was sharing some concepts with this young gun and I found myself actually learning while teaching. The missing puzzle you talking about kept appearing as we were jamming.

Bingo! It's part of growth. I was also told if you deliberately keep the last piece of the puzzle to yourself and not share it (as in the 12th step of the 12 step killer move), you will not progress too. Weird world.

Because that last missing piece is what makes the puzzle complete. By keeping that one last piece to yourself, it is akin to reversing all the 11th steps taken earlier

WOW your an inspiration for these students and to teachers like me too.

Thanks! We are open-sourcing the contents of the bootcamp later, so anyone can take it and implement it.

Your effort for the kids will return to you a hundred fold... Good job!

Thanks. Well, I'm just trying to 100x the stuff my mentors, coaches and teachers have taught me over the years.

But Teaching is not an easy job... but fulfilling afterall. I hooe i could get your support in this platform as well. Thank you soo much!

Awesome work Mav!

Thanks man!

love to read it .........

Good day how are you @maverickfoo
Pleasant surprise, excellent publication I see that these are the children of low resources that you told me, how good it is to help the needy, in the community that I am helping, we have the space to start a cycle of talks, we have a person who donate the Wifi connection but we do not have the equipment, here they are very expensive, buy them and that is why we want to raise a sum to buy the equipment, a strong hug continues to help

Tried but well, @esquinacreativa.

Yeah, equipment is necessary. What we do here is to look for second-hand laptops, or get corporates to donate their older machines to support the cause. Companies are more willing because they're happier coz we are not asking them for cash!

Ok it is a good idea to ask the companies, unfortunately here in Venezuela there is a hyperinflation and most companies do not have the capacity to help, I will have to buy myself some second mana to help the foundation, thanks for the advice @maverickfoo

All the best, chief. Where there's a will, there's a way.

Awesome work! Love the most dangerous writing app... Been using it with the freewrite challenge ever since I discovered that from your post. Introducing some of the challenges to the kids will also be a good way for them to find new friends too...

It's fun to see the kids hacking away at their keyboards when using this app.

Grammarly! Love this app, glad that those kids could learn about this tool so soon in their life.

Well, some say it'll make them lazy writers, but I say at least they are being reminded where they got it wrong, and over time, will get them right.

How they will be lazy? Grammarly is grammar correction tool not essay writing machine. They still have to do the writing what.

This is brilliant. For me this has been one of the most revelant posts as I am guilty for some of the misdeeds spoken of in your post @maverickfoo. So much so that I now writing out my posts on paper before steeming them. I'm definitely following you for this one homez.

I think we all have different approaches to writing. But it's good to experiment though. I enjoy testing out new habits to improve in my old ones.

wao great.... my question as all are sitting in the same room and looks like using same wifi connection..... is there no restructtion of IP ADDRESS on steemit????

Yeah there is. But not all of them are on Steemit at the same time. Some are on Typora typing their contents, some one Canva working on their artwork, some on Steemitchat, well, chatting!

Suppose two are there at same time or not at same time.....but the ip will be recorded as same when they login to steemit.....isn't it.....hope you'll clear it as i'm also a newbie....

let me confirm on that with a techie.

Ya sure waiting fa ans ..... but if possible reply me on my latest blog as there are alot of replies daily...

life must be useful for others.. nice posting

Nice idea @mavericfoo. Everyone gets a chance to discuss activities thanks to this :)

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Good day @maverickfoo,some stuff.I am some stuff

I have followed you, do not forget to upvote my blog fella ya

Tahniah. Semoga semua yang dilakukan bisa berguna bagi sesama. GBU@maverickfoo

Incredible work Mav!

Thanks mate!

saya senang steemian malaysia mulai tumbuh, semoga tumbuh bagaikan johan ..

salam steemian aceh..

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@maverickfoo has a great spirit that can motivate others..😎

They are really lucky to have you as their mentor. God bless you

Great work Mav! Follow back@vickiebwoy

Great post l like this post

Keep it up men

Hello @maverickfoo, I so love what you are doing for this kids and I must confess that I may not be there present in the traing ground but I can bet you that I am learning here as well. I have followed you as not to miss any of the bootcamp post because this is my own toturials on how to succeed on this platform.

excellent post friend

Awesome work bro! Keep it up. Really really glad you are helping the underprivileged

@maverickfoo you are such a wonderful teacher keep up your good work. I enjoyed your post and learnt some tips like your post since Day Zero.

Thank you for your wonderful post. So inspiring.

Sneaky Ninja Attack! You have been defended with a 3.21% vote... I was summoned by @maverickfoo! I have done their bidding and now I will vanish...Whoosh

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