This week, our group worked to put the finishing touches on our two newsletters. We communicated via email throughout the week. Monday we set up our next meeting with the client, this time with her students. Tuesday we met via instant messenger to prepare for that client meeting the next day. Wednesday Paul met with Deb and her students in the morning while Lauren, Maureen, and I met at Beacon Academy at 2 pm to get information for our articles. We then emailed the finished articles to each other that night.

This week our group made the first draft of our newsletters. We met online Tuesday night to make sure our drafts were ready to be sent to Julie. We also split up the work and decided who would write the memos. After receiving Julie’s feedback on Wednesday, the group met online again to make all the necessary changes. We then sent the two drafts of the newsletters to Deb. Deb wrote us back a very positive email saying that she loved what we had done thus far. Currently we are trying to decide on a time we can meet with the students next week to get more information for our articles.

This week our project really took off. We met with our client Monday afternoon to find out just what we would be doing. We decided on making two newsletters for the Beacon Academy that Deb could send out, one for the parents, and one for members of the community. The two newsletters will be very similar in format, just containing slightly different information. The parents’ newsletter would focus on what the students had been doing both in the classroom and out in the community.

The book had a lot of useful information that should pertain to all the different groups’ projects. For my group’s project, we will be designing two similar newsletters for the Beacon Academy, one to be sent to the parents, and the other to be sent out into the community. Chapters 24 and 25 of the textbook really stressed the importance of design. If our newsletter were entirely composed of plain black font of the same size and spacing, not a lot of people would want to read through it. The more eye-catching the newsletter, the more people will want to read through it.

This week brought the beginnings to our newest project, our service-learning project. My group was assigned the Beacon Academy in Lafayette. Beacon Academy is a school that works with at risk students. Deb Lukens, the school’s director is our client. We contacted her early Monday night in hopes of getting the project off to a good start. We sent her our contact information and let her know we were ready to begin working on whatever she has in store for us.

I think Project 3 will prove to be a very interesting and useful project for all of us enrolled in this class. I agree that both projects 1 and 2 were important and effective in preparing us for our futures in the business world, but I think this project is by far the most important. It gives us a hands-on experience working with an actual business with actual clients. I think we will all put more time and effort into this project simply because it will actually effect others rather than just our grades.

This week was a little crazy with figuring out exactly what needed to be changed in our paper. However, we managed to work together and complete the paper on time. Thank you Mike, Kendra and Hilina for all your hard work for the group! I think we all worked well together. ☺

This week, our group has been in the final stages of the white paper, actually writing a draft. On Monday, Mike combined all our group’s sources and posted the annotated bibliography. Then we split up portions of the draft and divided them amongst members. Hilina is writing the introduction and executive summary, Mike is writing half of the body portion on mobile messaging, Kendra is writing the other half on email, and I am combining everyone’s portions, checking for errors, adding the conclusion and posting the final draft.

This week our group has continued individual research after splitting up the topic. Mike and I took researching information on mobile messaging while Kendra and Hilina researched information on email. We each found a total of eight sources so that should put us up to at least 32 sources all together. We all communicated throughout the week over emails and plan to pick things up with a group meeting after break to continue our project.

America Online, Inc. “Third Annual Instant Messaging Trends Survey Discovers IM Has
Taken Over the Desktop.” PrimeNewsWire.com. 10 November 2005. 4 March 2008.