Perhaps those who love VTK don't spend a lot of time on facebook praising it, but rather, go on with their business as leaders. Perhaps major improvements are in the works and this post will be outdated by the time it is published. Perhaps the impression I get on facebook is correct, and leaders who have tried VTK have mostly found it lacking.
Problems I have with VTK
I'm going to list some of the problems I see with VTK, and then some things I think they are doing right.
It is paywalled
Ok, the only thing I have to pay to see it is my registration fee, but who besides Girl Scouts cares what our program requirements are? I suspect part of the answer is that GSUSA is trying to build one big unified system that will track a whole lot of stuff, and by getting me to log in before accessing the material, they can gather more data. Nevertheless, in order to review badge information on VTK, I have to log in, and from there, drill down even further.
It is too hard to get where I want to be
Once I log in, I have select Volunteer Toolkit (even though that was the button I pushed to get the log-in screen). Next it presents me with a year plan (even if that plan is empty) and from that screen I have to either add a meeting plan, or view a meeting plan. Can I look at a meeting plan before I add it? Nope.
At this point, leaders have to make a choice: they can either do as I have done and create large year plans that consist of every badge or Journey the troop may do, and from there, use VTK as a reference only, or they actually try to plan a few meetings on VTK by selecting the proper Journey or badges, adding them to the year plan and then reviewing them.
Once a badge is in your meeting plan (two meetings) you click on the first meeting or second. From there, you can scroll down and see an agenda. The terms used on the agenda are short and give very little idea what they are. For the first meeting for the Brownie First Aid badge, the agenda items are:
- As Girls Arrive
- Opening Ceremony
- Call 911
- Action 911 or Rock 911
- Homegrown hospital
- Snack Break--Healthy Body
- Closing Ceremony
To find out what those actually mean, you have to either click on each one, or go back to the top of the page and click on Activity Plan, which will take you to page that covers all except #4. Since a choice is given, you have to look elsewhere for those activities.
If you are going to require a log-in to use the system, then once a leader has logged in, she should be able to select a badge and see everything at that point. She should not have to go through all those steps just to see how to earn the XYZ badge.
The coorelations between the Girls Guide to Girl Scouting and Badge Explorer and VTK aren't clear
The requirements for most of the current badges were included in the Girls Guide to Girl Scouting or in the badge packs that are sold along side it. Each badge is covered in a magazine-like packet. On the front of the packet is an overall goal and five short requirements. These can be found on the publically accessible Badge Explorer. For example, the goal of the Brownie First Aid Badge is " When you've earned this badge, you'll know how to get help in an emergency and treat minor injuries." The five requirements are:
- Find out how to get help from 911
- Talk to someone who treats injured people
- Make a first-aid kit
- Learn how to treat minor injuries
- Know how to prevent and treat outdoor injuries
Inside the badge brochure is a page dedicated to each requirement, and that page gives three options for completing that requirement.
VTK uses two entire meetings to earn the First Aid badge (and all the other badges). During the first meeting, the girls:
- Draw a picture of a first responder
- Act out 911 scenarios
- Using art supplies, create a dream hospital
- Make a human body out of raw vegetables and then eat it as a snack
- Play do and don't call 911. Give the girls scenarios and they run to the "do call" or "don't call" side of the room
For the second meeting they:
- Decorate a bag or box to take home and fill for use as a first aid kit (like that's going to happen)
- Pass out bananas, sweet potato chips, yogurt or cheese and orage slices for snack. Talk about how these foods keep you heathy.
- Put a collection of items used to prevent outdoor injuries (like bug spray and sunscreen) on the table; give the girls various scenarios and ask them to pick what items they need. Talk about how the items prevent injury.
- Play Kim's Game with first aid kit items or do a scavenger hunt for first aid kit items
- Act out treating minor injuries using first aid kit supplies.
From what I can see NONE of these activities involve talking to someone who treats injured people. The badge brochure gives you the option of talking to a medical professional, visiting the fire station or interviewing police officers. From what I can see, the snack activities and the dream hospital activities have nothing to do with the badge requirements.
With the First Aid badge it is easy to see which activities correlate with which requirements, but other times it is not so clear. As a leader, I'd like to be able to glance at an overall plan for the badge and see that Activity A correlates with Requirement 1. That way I can decide whether to use that activity, one from the badge pack, or something else.
The meeting plans are too wordy and hard to follow
While I managed to summarize those two meeting plans in 173 words, the activity plan for Meeting 1 is 3/12 pages long, and well over 1000 words. I didn't check Meeting 2 but I think it was longer. Not only do they tell you to decorate the bag or box, they give you a word-for-word script of what to say to the girls about it. While they do say that you don't have to follow the script, it is there, and if you aren't a good skimmer, that's a lot of verbiage to get through to figure out how to do a badge.
I wish VTK had a "summary" type option that laid out the plans in pretty much the way I did in the previous section. Then, if I wanted the script, I could drill deeper. "As Girls Arrive" tells me nothing. "Draw a Picture of a first responder" tells me what the activity is.
They didn't ditch or re-do bad programming
The format originally envisioned for Journeys was that they would take a substantial part of the year. For Daisies, Journey meetings consisted of an opening, the leader reading overly long convaluted stories to the girls, and then doing some rather meh activities. I know of few leaders who have succeeded when using that format. Put simply, those stories are awful. Does GSUSA admit that, suck it up and provide story-less Journey plans? No, it provides word-for-word scripts on how to read those stupid stories. Those Journeys didn't fail because leaders didn't say the right words; they failed because they were trying to do too many things with badly written stories.
It Lacks Flexibility
Everything in VTK is in a scripted meeting plan. While you can add and subtract elements from the pre-populated plan (so I could skip the hospital room project if desired) and you can move them around within a meeting (so I could make the first aid kit first and practice 911 later) there is no easy way to combine activities from two different meeting plans. I'm often working on two badges at once, and VTK doesn't allow this.
I'd like to be able to click on "Plan a Meeting" and then on First Aid Badge. Under First Aid Badge I'd like to see the 5 requirements and under each requirement, the activities to meet it. I could click the ones I wanted to do this week, and, if I wanted to add a savory snack to work on our Snacks badge, I could add that as well. If I wanted to add my Daisies' Safety Pin activities, I could navigate to that, click and add. If I wanted to add my own activty, that would be easy to do too.
Things I Like About VTK
It gives more options than the badge packs have, and is often more practical
Sticking to the Brownie First Aid badge, the badge pack suggested ideas are:
- Find out how to get help from 911
- Role-play 911
- Practice 911 with friends or family
- Get advice from a police officer or firefighter about calling 911
- Talk to someone who treats injured people
- Interview a doctor or nurse
- Visit a fire station and talk to the fire fighters
- Visit a police station and talk to a police officer
- Make a first-aid kit
- Make a first aid kit for your home
- Make a first aid kit for your GS meeting place
- Make a first aid kit and donate it
- Learn how to treat minor injuries
- Ask a doctor or nurse to talk to your group
- Learn with the Red Cross
- Talk to an EMT
- Know how to prevent and treat outdoor injuries
- Take a hike with a ranger or camp director and find things to avoid. Talk about what to do about bug bites, sunburn etc.
- Get a book or go online to read about things to avoid and how to treat bug bites etc.
- Talk to an outdoor expert (older Girl Scout, experienced hiker or member of an outdoor society about those things
Following those activities would require at least one field trip/guest speaker, maybe more. The VTK plans don't require either one (though I question the inconsistancy between the requirements and the meeting plans).
The scripts may be helpful for new leaders
When I got out of my leader training many years ago, I knew that GS involved "girl led"; what I didn't know and couldn't tell from the material given to me, or that I purchased was what a GS meeting was supposed to look like. With VTK, new leaders don't have that problem. If they want a script, they have one.
It is easy to find the meeting aids
Many of the VTK plans have worksheets or coloring sheets that you can copy. There are links to vidoes too. If you can plow through everything and are a good skimmer, there are a lot of goodies in VTK, the trouble is figuring out they exist. They are at the bottom of the main page of the meeting.
It would be nice if there was one central download center where I could find the aids listed by Badge/Journey with a short descripton.
What do you think of VTK? Have you tried it at all? What do you think GSUSA got right, and wrong?
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