From diflnews at floridadi.org Tue Nov 26 13:35:15 2019 From: diflnews at floridadi.org (Florida DI News) Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2019 08:35:15 -0500 Subject: [DIFLnews] November Newsletter References: <003701d5a45e$57108840$053198c0$.ref@yahoo.com> Message-ID: As this holiday season approaches, we would like to wish you a wonderful time with family and friends. We are grateful that you are interested and involved in children's education and consider that Destination Imagination could be a part of that effort. Florida DI is facing a challenge. Destination Imagination, Inc. has changed their requirements for Affiliates, and as a result we are required to purchase insurance. As we are still a very small Affiliate, it would be prohibitively expensive to our teams if we tried to raise our affiliate fees to cover this cost. To this end, we are searching for funding sources, including company grants and sponsorships to keep the program alive in Florida. Our current Board of Directors does not have expertise or connections in this area. If you have information on sources that we could approach it would be appreciated. If you have expertise on fundraising, we would love to have you on our team. You can also help. If you shop on Amazon, we are part of the Amazon Smile program. When you select Florida DI to be your charity, a small donation is credited to us for each purchase you make. We are also participating in Giving Tuesday and have a donation button set up on our facebook page. Thank you for your consideration of these matters. Time is flying by, but there is still time to purchase a team membership and get started . The sooner you start, the more benefit your team will get from the program. If you are just now getting started, don't worry. You should probably encourage your team to work on selecting a challenge and then create a Goals Calendar. This will help your team stay focused and use solid project management principles to stay on target for the season. Have them mark on a calendar when they think they should be finished with major parts of their solution- script, costumes, props, technical devices, etc. Pull that calendar out at every meeting and talk about how long they have to get things done. Ask if anybody wants to work on certain aspects on their own and bring them back in at a future meeting. Remember that kids have their own way of looking at the world, and getting them to focus can be a challenge, especially younger teams who have not had to work with others on a long term project. This can be very frustrating for you an adult, especially if they might get stuck in the "storming" stage of team development, or lose sight of their goals. Refer to the Roadmap, DII blogs and Team Manager trainings for some ideas of how to help your team past some of these roadblocks, and realize that your team may have to readjust their goals (or you may have to readjust your thinking of what they "should" accomplish) and that it is okay. Our Florida tournament is conducted as a celebration of what your teams have accomplished, and we work very hard to make sure our appraisers understand that. Online Team Manager Training Available In addition to the Adobe training offered by Destination Imagination headquarters, our California Affiliate of Destination Imagination has posted several wonderful online videos of their team manager training session. These are great refresher courses, or excellent for new team managers. You can find the videos here. We would like your feedback on these videos, so please drop us a note at difl.info at yahoo.com if you use any of these Are you looking for more help to be a successful team manager? If so, check out Destination Imagination's blog post. The blog is full of helpful tips on how to be the ultimate facilitator for your team. California Destination Imagination has shared some webinars that they have created for each of the Challenges. These are really worth your time to dive deeper into the Challenge that your Team is doing. Team Tournament Registrations Please register your team challenge selection with Destination Imagination. Knowing what challenges you are working on, helps Destination Imagination and us at Florida DI with our tournament planning. Remember that you need to register with both DII and Florida DI. Our Florida tournament registration is now open, so that you can start to enter your team's information for us as well. You may change any information on your registrations for us until registration closes on February 29. Important Dates Florida Tournament Registration closes February 29, 2020. Florida DI tournament in Maitland Saturday, March 28, 2020. Global Finals tournament in Kansas City, Missouri May 20 through 23, 2020 Erica Bowler Affiliate Director Florida Destination Imagination www.floridadi.org DIFL.info at yahoo.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.png Type: image/png Size: 29393 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 4878 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.png Type: image/png Size: 13546 bytes Desc: not available URL: