GOING ONLINE: MY EXPERIENCE

With quarantine happening, many of our events have been moved online. This isn’t limited to Key Club, but school and other extracurriculars that others might be involved in. It is definitely a new thing to us all, and a shift many of us might not have been prepared for. When school closed, we all had to adjust to doing our work at home and learning at home. I’ll be honest: for me, I thought it was great. I was able to do my work in the beginning of the week and it felt like we had less work than before. Not only that, but being able to sleep in longer in the morning was a huge plus. Of course, these things vary among different people and depend on the teacher. However, I know that this pleasurable experience I had was not shared with everyone. Others may have had more trouble not learning in person, more prone to procrastination, and many other personal factors. Starting the 2020-2021 Key Club term being stuck at home was difficult to say the least. Many events were cancelled: both the division and our home club banquets, DCON, regular outside service events, and our monthly DCMs. It seemed like we were extremely limited and it would be a rough start. However, we were able to persevere through it. We held our own service weeks with events that Key Clubbers were able to do at home, watched DCMs through Zoom/Youtube, and all the information that needed to be shared was spread. In fact, we just had our June service week, which was the third one we’ve had during this quarantine. The inspiration for this article actually comes from a recent event that happened: our Officer Training Conference. This event was well planned out and went really smoothly. The advantages of the technology we had helped run this conference over Zoom. There were multiple breakout sessions with workshops that allowed us to learn new things that may be helpful to us during our time as officers. I was really impressed with the cleanliness throughout the meeting despite the online circumstances. That’s enough time of me simply talking about my experience; I wanted to share some things about how I got through all of these online occasions. Though we are not in school currently, we may be doing the same virtual learning when we go back in the fall. When this happens, I encourage you to take advantage of all the resources that you are given from your teachers. This is something that I started doing from the beginning, and it really helped me throughout. Because we can’t see our teachers in person, sometimes we don’t know if there’s more content we should know, or if we're learning “too much”. This might sound silly, but I know I wasn’t the only one who was thinking this when tests were coming up. So take the initiative to check Google Classroom, absorb all the information given, and don’t be afraid to email your teacher! Online learning is new to them too, and I’m sure they’d love to communicate to help our learning go smoother. I didn’t forget Key Club! When it comes to Key Club, there are many events that are happening but sometimes can only be known about through social media or our emails. Because of this, it is crucial to be on it when checking for new service opportunities or events. I’m sure you don’t want to miss out when something is happening! With that being said, keep serving the community from home until we can all see each other again in person.