We had a first collective meeting with the Ambassadors from six schools! The list of school ambassadors attended is SJA Jeju, NLCS, KIS Jeju, Gyeonggi Academy of Foreign Languages (GAFL), Cheongshim International Academy, and Kyungpook National University High School (KNUHS). Two ambassadors from each school gathered together to discuss collectively about the project.
The main agendas of the meeting were,
- Development of the tool
We all agreed that in order to show the efficiency of the skills in a more visible way, an example with a longer text is needed. Say you have 600-800 ish words and right next to it, through this method, it can be reduced to even less than 100 words. People will be attracted to this kind of comparison. It will show how our skill organizes information in a much more efficient way.
We also talked about how some Korean schools are using the term ‘paraphrasing’ in a different way such as ‘simply rephrasing’ or ‘expressing the meaning using different words. We decided to use ‘column system’ moving forward to not arouse any confusion among students.
The final agenda under the development of the tool was generating different steps for students’ English proficiency level, just like the new digital SAT. We discussed dividing the column into 3, 6, and 10 steps so that people can practice it gradually. First with 10, then those who become skilled move to 6, then 3, then finally one can paraphrase the sentence without going through the steps physically (but obviously still going through it in the head automatically).
- Promotion poster slogan
When it comes to promotion, it’s important to have a hook that attracts the reader. As ambassadors, we came to think of several hooks that deliver a transparent message about the skills. It’s different from the conventional note-taking system so there’s a shift of perspective, and it saves a lot of time by reducing the tedious work of students. Maximization of efficiency and practicality is one of our main goals. Our skill also teaches how to selectively choose information among thousands of pages of content. We concluded that we will use various slogans such as “less is more, smarter not harder” and keep the tone simple.