Rita the blogger

We didn't learn much in class this week. Nonetheless the class was still productive. We were meant to have a presentation from representatives from Seibo Japan but unfortunately, they were not able to make it. As usual, we got unto our groups and begun to discuss strategies to help Seibo Japan. We also learnt of the easiest way to make a website. We used google sites and had a chance to test it out. We grasped the basics that will help us design our website. It was an okay class overall. Hopefully when the Seibo Japan representatives come and share more of who they are and what they do we can have more ideas to work with. 

 In week seven we learnt about how to conduct productive and efficient meetings. A lot of meetings are done poorly and usually aren't productive or when they are they aren't efficient. The first question to ask is if it's even necessary for the meeting to take place. Meetings that happen for the sake of happening are usually a waste of time and the time wasted would have been used for other business projects. A good meeting should always start on time. Additionally, giving five minutes before the meeting for informal conversation allows the participants to loosen up before the meeting. Starting your meeting with a good positive opening line, for example "Okay everyone good news..." uplifts the participants. A good meeting should have a to-do checklist. In every meeting goals should be checked off the to-do list and others should be added to the to-do list. If there are any problems they should be discussed in the meeting and solutions should be found. During the m...

 In week four we did the marshmallow challenge. This challenge involved a string, a piece of tape, some spaghetti sticks and a marshmallow. All we had to do was assemble our instruments into the tallest tower possible that supports the marshmallow in under eighteen minutes in our respective groups. The challenge was a little tricky but overall fun. From it we had a lot of lessons. We learnt not to waste time looking for a leader of the group. With the time limit, making sketches of our prototypes was a waste of time. Rather, just get into it and learn by doing. We learnt not to make assumptions of what we can and can't do. Not looking at other teams for ideas was one assumption. Another assumption was believing we could do it without any more resources, which led us to not ask for more resources even if we could. We also learnt that children are way better at this challenge than most adults. Adults tend to over think things and over complicate things but children just have fun with...

In class this week we learnt about business strategies to sell a product. We started the class by first learning about Feedly, a bloggers website. We made accounts and proceeded to follow bloggers that interested us. We explored the site a little and learnt that it was not only blogs we could follow but other news outlets. We then learnt about the 4Ps; Product, Price, Place, Promotion. These later extended to 7Ps; Process, Physical space, People. The first P, Product should have a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) and the last P, Promotion should lead to attraction, interest, desire and action from the buyer and is abbreviated as AIDA. We went on to talk about the SWOT Analysis. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. A business should check for each of these when deciding to sell a product.  For a quality product, a business or organization should be able to analyze their product with all these strategies.  The class was good but a little fast paced. ...

In the second week's class we learnt about Brainstorming. We learnt about the steps taken when coming up with a solution for a problem. I learnt about the SPIDER method. SP for Spectator, I for Insider D for Dreamer E for evaluator and R for realist. Firstly, we split our problems into two groups; that which can be seen by an insider and another that can be noticed by a spectator. From the list of problems obtained our respective groups came up with a corresponding list of solutions and one thing to always remember when working on solutions is that there are no bad ideas and also pretend the sky is the limit. That is why that step is called 'Dreamer'. Once each group was done with their solutions we moved on to the next step of the SPIDER method, the 'Evaluator'. We divided the solutions into three categories; 'Absolutely not', 'Maybe with some modifications' and 'Yes we can'. Now that we had all the solutions organized we could clearly see w...