What is YDEV?

"Teachers play an incredibly important role, but fro every teacher that influences a child's life, imagine how many "youth workers" - broadly defined - are doing so as well?"

Youth development is more than just child care, more than just teachers and more than just office work. Youth workers are another individual included in this phrase that a village is needed to raise a child. Youth workers are a child's coaches, instructors, and any after school activity leader. These people are important to a child's health and well being. Having multiple adult youth workers for youth to talk to and express themselves to is what helps youth grow. Youth development is anything and everything that has to do with helping the youth in our communities grow to use their full potential to better their lives and their surroundings. 

Event #2

While at my internship there was a teacher meeting on a professional day on November 23rd. At this professional day the teachers and principal talked about using the google programs online as a classroom tool. Such as Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Forms etc. Google drive is a quick way to save documents and images so you can open them up quickly on a different device. This could be helpful in a classroom because you can save images or large documents instead of printing such document. Google docs is useful in classrooms for papers when they are working on a certain document at home and also work on it at school. Google docs can also help when a student is working in a group with other students and they can work on the document at the same time. This means that not just one can work on the paper at a time, this means a student doesn't have to wait on another student to finish their side of the paper before the other can work on it. Google forms can be used when a teacher or principle would like to have the student body's opinion but would like to have the answers be anonymous. This could be a useful tool for all youth development settings because youth tend to not like their names being used when answering a form. With this program students can rate or answer questions about the setting or about other information without the connection of their name. Youth development could use the technology advances to make submitting assignments to teachers easier and possible even if a student is sick. Sometimes youth do not have the access to resources that they need such as these programs through google so having these free programs available for someone with a computer or even a phone could help youth's education.

Event #1

On November 2nd I went to the new president's town hall which is where the students told the president about our issues with the campus and asked questions to the students about certain topics such as diversity. This town hall was known as a listening tour in which students, faculty and staff were able to give their input on issues and opportunities that the school has done well on.

As our new President Frank Sanchez settles into his new position he is already taking leaps and bounds over our previous president when it comes to taking in the students ideas. I shared with the president the Youth Development group advising ideas and how helpful that other students have better ideas than some advisors do for their students. He shared with us the new advising technique that some advisors came up with in order to make the advising experience better. Mr. Sanchez is thinking about the youth in college and is trying to make the transition from high school to college an easy one rather than stressful. With the changes he wants to make he is making this college campus a better environment for the youth. Mr. Sanchez is concerned about the safety for the diversity on campus such as LGBT+ individuals who request gender neutral bathrooms. We all know this campus does not have the requested amount of gender neutral bathrooms that would be suggested for the amount of students that are on campus. Mr. Sanchez put this into perspective and with the renovations of the buildings more gender neutral bathrooms will be made to accommodate these needs. This is what the definition of youth development is, he is working hard to make the environment better for the youth at Rhode Island College.