Audience and Educational Relevance

We want this website to inspire people to be kind. Our website was designed to appeal to kids age 9 to 12, but anyone of any age can learn something from this website, even parents and teachers. Our design, content, and activities appeal to both boys and girls. We used vocabulary that is easy to read and easy to comprehend. We hope that schools and communities will use the information, project ideas, and other resources on this website to help kids understand that kindness can change our world. This website was designed to

• Focus on the positive - There are so many stories of violence, unhappiness, and war in the news that we decided we wanted to focus on something positive as the topic for this website.
• Change the way people think - We believe that when people change the way they think, their behavior changes, too. We believe that many of the problems people face in the world today could be solved if being kind becomes a daily thought.
• Change the way people act - We want kids to realize that how we think determines how we act. We can make a choice each day to make the world a better place. We want everyone to realize that we must do more than talk about being kind, we should put actions behind our words.
• Use original content, graphics, images, and media - We wanted to accomplish our goals by using original content from interviews and communications with other people, especially kids. Our graphics, artwork, and media are original including all of the music.

Diversity

Our team is diverse, but we believe when everyone works together, a team will achieve all of its goals. We are from two different countries, three different socioeconomic groups, and three different ethnic groups. We have put into practice all the things that our website teaches such as kindness, tolerance, sportsmanship, friendship, listening, giving, helping, caring, politeness, and understanding. We did our best to be considerate and thoughtful of each other and everyone we worked with on this project.

We used an Internet translator and wrote to each other in both Portuguese and English. We found out that our writing is different because our ages range from 9 to 12 years old. Danielle and Viviane's writing is more descriptive. It was hard to make all of the writing the same in this website because the text that we exchanged was changed with the translation. We learned that some of the meaning was lost. Professor Daniel is the only person on our team who speaks both languages. One time Mrs. Harris' name was translated "Bad Harris". It was funny, but we were a little worried that we might say something wrong, mean, or offensive. Professor Daniel kept a check on our translations and let us know when we needed to correct them. We posted our work and assignments for this project on Think.com in both languages so that everyone could participate in all of the work and keep up with the tasks. We were able to use a few of our new words when we talked to each other using Skype.

Some of the postings on our blog and on Think.com were controversial and we were able to get many different points of view. We discussed how we feel when we are kind and when we are not kind. We asked people their opinions about what makes a person kind. We learned ways to show kindness and heard many points of view from both kids and adults. Most people agreed with us about kindness and only a few were sarcastic. One person signed their comment, "practicewhatyapreach". We did not think it was very kind, but we understand that different people have different points of view.

The most controversial topic was tolerance. The topic that most kids were concerned about was bullies. After reading comments from other kids and looking at the survey results, we decided to do more writing and a video about school bullying and cyberbullies. We listened to our classmates, friends, and people we have never met to learn what they have to say about these important topics.

Audience, Educational Relevance, and Diversity • Collaboration

Global Impact • Credits, References, Site Map