My name is Kavi Arya I am faculty in the computer science department and one of the subjects that I teach is embedded systems embedded systems basically are the intelligence if you like embedded in devices and it needs a totally different approach to build these kind of systems as opposed to your conventional software systems like your banking verticals and conventional software like spreadsheets and all these kind of things. So, what I would like to share with you in this short kind of 20 minutes presentation that I have is an interesting project at IIT Bombay which we would like you to participate in in some way called E Yantra. So, what we have done is that over the last 5 years in teaching embedded systems through a distance education program we found it very difficult to motivate students. So, we found that unless students have actually programmed and done a lab where they made things move and lights flash and things like that they do not seem to have learnt very much. So, we came up with this idea of teaching through robotics robot is a very nice instance of an embedded system. So, over the last 5 years we have developed a range of robots in the lab which now we have started spreading through engineering colleges we have covered some 180 engineering colleges all over the country. We have just come back from giving a very exciting workshop in Srinagar in Kashmir and at the moment while we are talking there are there is a workshop going on at IIT Bombay for the colleges of Mumbai university and the vice chancellor himself has insisted that all his engineering colleges be exposed to our workshop. So, what we have done is that 55 engineering colleges and from each engineering college one faculty and two students are attending this workshop and we have a series of five back to back workshops and what we are doing is that we are starting them with the first few steps towards an interest in robotics through the robotics workshop that we have developed and I will show you some examples toward the end of this talk as to what you can do once you attended this workshop. So, a little bit about this E-Anthra project incidentally this is just a small part of the embedded systems course that we teach. As part of the course we give our own students in the M Tech program a two day workshop like this to get them acquainted with the robots on which they will do all their assignments. So, a little bit about this. So, I will talk a bit about robots for college education and for doing much more than that and talk about the present status of our project. But one little thought I would like to share with you it might not be anything about engineering, but it is just to indicate with you that no predictions based on the past are valid nowadays because the world is changing so fast. I often share this statistic with our students that is I heard this at a talk by a leading stockbroker Ramdev Agarwal at a talk he said that it is taken India 60 years to become a trillion dollar economy trillion dollars is when the world starts looking at you differently you become a huge market you become empowered you are a rich man basically and it is taken 60 years that means 2008 India crossed that mark and how long do you think is going to take for two trillion dollars anybody would volunteer in the audience here two trillion dollars how long is it going to take us from 2008 10 years is a possibility actually it is about 6 to 7 years for two trillion dollars. So, in about 2013 or 14 we will reach there we have already gone past the crossed the one and a half trillion mark and from there we are on the same growth path as China. Now, for the economy to grow like this we have to be doing things very differently. So, I tell all the students that stop listening to your parents for instance about guidance in career because their picture is of a slow moving country 30 40 years ago India is totally different how many of us would have predicted the way mobile phones have penetrated the country in the last 5 years even nobody would have. Similarly, computers, software, innovation in technology, embedded systems there is a big need for automation in this in this country now like for instance if you want to if you are a person growing flowers outside Pune flowery culture you cannot grow flowers manually if you want to export you cannot meet those quality requirements for export if you are growing flowers manually you need to have greenhouses with highly regulated environments which can only be done through automation and all this technology at the moment is being bought from outside from the Dutch through Indodutch collaborations through Israel or what have you. And this is not rocket science there is no reason why we cannot do it ourselves even the demography is changing of the country. Buys are very difficult to get nowadays Jadu pocha you know basic cleaning and swabbing in the house we need automation for these things we need inventors to build these kind of things. So, we want to see if we can grow this kind of different in my difference in mindset and our workshop if you like our e-entre project and our course is a medium through which we are trying to effect change. So, this is the slide that I normally start with in my course which each icon represents an application domain for embedded systems. And I invite the audience to consider which of these application domains does not have an embedded system in it. Any volunteers here go on syringe any others I will share with you the kind of feedback one gets syringe handcuffs violin scarecrow is a popular one. Now, let me just talk about the scarecrow. Handcuffs is forensic applications you heard of those students in America who got the RFID tags attached to them to make sure to just track them. So, police and forensic applications lots and lots of applications of embedded systems surveillance cameras automatically checking up on things even nowadays restaurants and malls have got cameras which are doing real time image processing counting the number of heads which are coming in. Face recognition is happening a lot. So, camera is looking at who is coming in and matching the face like you have on picasa if you upload some pictures it tells you which of your friends are there in the picture automatically. Music is the biggest driver of embedded systems scarecrow a friend who is director of an agriculture institute asked me for a scarecrow automatic scarecrow he says I have to imply 4 buys on my hybrid fields and I am paying 12000 rupees a month why cannot we just build a small automated thing which can show away birds. So, my students built it as an embedded systems project a cost project and there is much more one can do with it. There is a company being incubated here called agrocom which deploys little weather stations in fields in the grape growing district of Maharashtra in Nasek and those machines in the field have an effective range of 2 3 kilometers and they are monitoring leaf wetness temperature humidity and helping you predict pest attacks and crop diseases by sending you an SMS. So, like I said everywhere you have this kind of stuff local innovation we been encouraging when we went to Kashmir we said that think of all your local industry needs. How can you improve agriculture or horticulture all these kind of things using technology and do not look westwards for solutions because you might get the solution, but they are too expensive and then you will not be able to compete with those guys. When you just want to absorb technology within the country it is ok to buy it, but if you want to compete with them then you cannot buy it you have to build it yourself and it can be done robots for college education. So, this is the society that we need to prepare ourselves for we want to create engineers who can build these complex machines. We need no problem comes to you with a little label saying that I am an electrical engineering problem or I am a computer science problem it is up to you to crack the problem whichever way you want it can be crack mechanically electronically software wise or what have you. So, just think of the way an iPod was designed or an iPad was designed or some interesting applications like that. It was not designed by this software oriented view that here is a requirement specification now building me an iPad is designed by a cross disciplinary team of engineers who sit down and negotiate. If the guy wants to put a bigger battery for longer use then the chap will say that hey I cannot do that you cannot fit more than this size battery then he has to be very intelligent about the software algorithms he uses in order to fit that much time of use within the machine then you need to negotiate with the display guy and the manufacturing guy right who says if you put that battery will become too fat and you need to make it more thin and so on. So, anyway this is what we need to achieve to create more such engineers and we do it by engaging with colleges conducting workshops and partnering with them and creating and harvesting open source content. So, one of the big problems we had is any college that I had gone to in the past which had interest in robotics if the student wanted to do a project he could not because you do not get a robot in the market and then he had to build a robot to do an application and by the time he built a robot his time is up and again next year the same thing starts again. So, we tackle that problem by designing this robot over the last 5 years is called the fire word robot in this case and we have created an ecosystem where we have a company that manufactures distributes and so on and this is the kind of thing on which you can do a lot of interesting BE projects and more is used as a research vehicle for us also. It has a bunch of proximity sensors in front which can sense up to 1 and half meters to millimeter accuracy it is got a board at the bottom which does all the signal conditioning it is got output in the form of an LCD it is got a daughter board on top which can drive it with a variety of processors you can have a daughter board for 8051 for at mega 2560 for arm 7 and what have you and if all you want to do is give our workshops then you can use these robots which are 2000 rupees one is 15000 and one is 2000. So, you can get started with the robot club using these kind of robots and so on. So, a lot of open source content all the robots are open source a lot of documentation software hardware manuals everything is on the E Yantra project website and when we give these workshops students can go away with a CD with everything on it and microcontroller concepts have become very easy to teach a faculty reflected to me that sir what you have done in this workshop it takes us 6 months to get to it in our curriculum, but in the first 2 days we just hit you with it and it works and we use it to teach a variety of courses like microcontrollers embedded systems mechatronics control systems what have you and this just gives you a flavor of the robot development 5 years ago we saw very expensive robots and then we came up with our own which are the ones on the right hand side and then we ruggedize them and this is the painful process that we have been through a very clue G looking robot in 2005 and we put it into a floppy disk case and then we sort of tried to improve it and finally, we have come to we also tried a lab in a box where you construct your own robot and then deploy, but we found that this does not work with computer science students they are terrified of hardware. So, this is where we reached this is the arms 7 robot this is a variety of adapter boards that sit on the robot with different processes which drive it this is the actuation change to wheels to two tracks instead of wheels and this is with our basic robot board can drive about 4 DC motors or 18 servo motors. So, with that you can have a variety of locomotion you can have the omnibot with 3 wheels and each of the wheels has got smaller wheels on it. So, you can differentially drive those wheels to actuate left right front back base that and the other you can have a hexavod right 6 legged insect kind of thing crab kind of thing. And once we built it we wondered what to do with it. So, we just gave some BE projects and students did some interesting things with it and more important than the robot is the software because software is what helps you solve problems. We have the robot potted under Microsoft robotic studio under you can write C to drive it or you can use Esterel Luster code or Matlab or Scilab right. So, lot of software environments you can use to actually program these things to solve interesting problems. This is what the Microsoft robotic studio environment looks like for visual programming then you can do a physically based simulation of the robot before you actually deploy the code with the press of a button on the real robot. The content factory if you like which creates the open source content is our undergraduate and postgraduate courses where in the last 5 weeks they do a project. So, we have a laptop and a robot for every 2 students to do all the assignments and then they do a 5 week project in teams of 4 right. So, lots of workshops this is just flashing some slides of the various institutions which have been through us right. This is what the workshop with the faculty looks like in the lab. There was an interesting workshop in December 2009 Professor Nagla from NIT Jalandhar came. He went back and gave the same workshop to his students and used the robot that he gave us and they built a nice project he was very excited he wrote he wrote a very nice letter to us and his students built a very cute cleaning robot which they deployed in barber shops to clean up they would have vacuum cleaner and they kind of cleaned the shop right. So, these are the kinds of stories we like to hear from our friends who attended the workshops. So, we have a Scilab plan, but our main plan is how to get students started in robotics how to empower them to solve problems and how to address the challenge of entrepreneurship and all these kind of things. So, I would not take too much of your time now I will just go to the end actually. So, our learning is that we want to spread the study and use of robotics in colleges. We want to build a multidisciplinary manpower and the main metric we assess now to see how much of an impact we made is by seeing the number of BE projects which we have influenced in the engineering colleges right. So, BE projects if you folks are interested in being a part of this Iyantra experiment if you like is not so much an experiment we know it works and it works pretty well now and you want to start a robotics club in your college and you want to inspire interesting BE projects be in touch with us go to the Iyantra website mail me if you like my address is available at IIT Bombay Kavi at cac.iitb.ac.in I am on the computer science website and what I shall do is because we do not have time I shall show you the videos of a few of the projects of the kind of projects the students have done. This is a batch which happened at the end of 2010. So, this is students who have taken the hexapod and they have made it write out some letters that is the first useful thing that we did with it right as you can see h e x and they have learned some very useful things in the process. Then another bunch built locomotion using the hexapod. So, they made the hexapod this climb the obstacle and then perform various dance moves on the top of this obstacle. Yeah in fact it can go more. So, another lot made the robot climb a staircase and once it climbed the staircase it did something interesting right what would students do right they made it dance. You cannot hear the music here we cannot hear it, but they can hear it. So, then it is kind of dancing it looks quite cute as it is right. So, that is what the robot does and another bunch of students built an artist bot right which is it is a robot that we visually captured a picture then they did image processing on it to skeletonize it turn it into vectors and then one robot mounts a marker pen on its pod the camera pod it mounts a marker pen and it reproduces that image. So, without knowing it these guys have built a plotter driver. Now, it is up to other projects to take this code this basic code which is already there and build it into a more complex code like the projects we got after this is some students built a rangoli robot there you mount you mount a rangoli dispenser and it can go to a mall and maybe make a picture by doing a raster scan and dropping rangoli powder right. That is an and there is another group after that which did a project where they used the sensors inside an android phone a Motorola phone in this case to drive the robot. So, by tilt is used the tilt and gyroscopic sensors in the phone to control the robot. So, you tilt it forward it goes forward tilt its side it goes side and so on and they also had to build a bluetooth interface a small board which goes on the robot all these things are done in 5 weeks time right. Then there is another bunch of students who had an electrical engineer amongst them who helped them build a glove controlled robot where you put a circuit board with sensors on it and you control the robot with your hands. The cable that you see there is only a power cable because the batteries do not last very long right. So, so many students are doing their projects here is a tennis ball collector robot where you do image processing to spot a ball an orange ball and then you move the robot towards it right and go and pick up that that ball and drop it in the blue bin ok. So, all this is based on MATLAB, but we have flavors on open source software like Sylab and stuff like this right. So, it is going and it is going to deposit that in the blue box I will stop immediately after this one because I think time is short. So, this just gives you a flavor of the kind of things that students can do and they get very excited and once main thing is to get excited about what you are doing and you do very interesting things right. So, what we are encouraging students to do is to take previous projects and build on it, make them more complex, make them applicable in different domains and stuff like that. There is a lot to do and we have about 100 such projects uploaded on the website, the source code, the documentation, the report, a spoken tutorial which leads you through how to set up and run the project itself. So, you could not want anything more right and we are using this to seed a large number of B projects. See one more thing is students do not realize how important the B E project is right because the B E project is the sign of their maturity if you like as engineers. If a guy has just done say a database application for a library and comes to us right we are less impressed than if he is done something a bit more impressive. So, the first thing that we do when we are interviewing students for projects or for any position here or in for m text and stuff like that is that we talk to them about the B E project because that tells you the mark of a student right what is the level of sophistication. So, what we have done is that we have created an environment with which you can motivate the teaching of computer science and IT and stuff like that using these robots and we have a large amount of open source content there to help you all and the first step is to contact us and then we will take you from there organize workshops and do whatever is required and this is if you like a tester for the embedded systems course which will be running for the faculty through the same medium in December, but that is a separate process. So, this is just to share with you the E Yantra project and to invite you to be a part of it by writing to us. The project website is e-yantra.org and I suggest that if you have any queries or you would like to arrange a workshop suggest you go to the website and let us know. We have a presence on Facebook also and you can check us out e-yantra on Facebook and my email address is kavi at cse.itb.ac.in and do be in touch with us if you want to get started in robotics at your college and we will be happy to help with whatever is required. Thank you.


Wildlife managers say Minnesota's gray wolf population remains stable and healthy. The Department of Natural Resources released its annual estimate today. The mid-winter survey put the state's population at 2,065 wolves and 465 packs. Given the survey's margin of error, the DNR says that's statistically unchanged from last winter's estimate. Hunting wolves in Minnesota is now illegal. Minnesota had held three wolf seasons before a federal judge put wolves back on the protected list in December 2014. DNR large carnivore specialist Dan Stark says long-term trends demonstrate that Minnesota's wolf population is fully recovered.


The House of Representatives has resolved to conduct an investigative hearing on the non-compliance by banks and financial institutions with Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN Directive, on the net open position limits. The resolution of the House followed the adoption of a motion of urgent national importance on the need for banks to implement CBN's policies on holding excess long foreign exchange and net open positions limit. Moved at the plenary on Wednesday by Honourable Babajimi Benson. Seeing the motion, Benson explained that a CBN is saddled with the responsibility of regulating the monetary policies of the country as provided by the CBN Act. Uncertain financial institutions in Nigeria usually hold back a large part of foreign exchange that they obtain either through purchase, borrowing or allocation from the CBN rather than lending or lending same to their customers with a view to selling it when the exchange rate is high. The House is worried that this speculative activity by commercial banks and certain financial institutions has further exacerbated the harsh economic situation in the country and has led to difficulty by legitimate businesses to obtain foreign exchange for their business transactions. In another development, the House of Representatives has mandated the Committees on Education Examination Board and Basic Education to interact with the National Examination Council NECO on her planned 2024 promotion examination for about 1,500 staff. This followed the adoption of a motion on matter of urgent public importance moved by Honourable Akim Adeyemi. While moving the motion, Honourable Adeyemi says the House is aware that in the past, the examination body has conducted similar promotion examinations for her staff at various zonal or regional offices without necessarily making them converge in large numbers and in one place for the promotion exercise. Also at Plenary, the House adopted the motion by Honourable Dominic Okafor, summoning the FCT Minister Nyesom Wike, the National Security Advisor Nuhuri Badiwan, heads of all security agencies, overriding insecurity in the federal capital. Honourable Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, the National Secretary Advisor and heads of all security agencies for an emergency security briefing and strategy. Two, mandate the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory install security cameras in around the FCT and its environs. Also to install other security gadgets and the 5th security personnel with modern security equipment to combat the rising and frightening insecurity within the territory and its environs including the use of drones. Third, mandate heads of all security agencies to urgently collaborate among themselves through and set up special units with affirmations to track and clamp down on the criminal elements within and around the territory. Fourth, mandate the security agency to immediately commence the use of the registered national education number nine in their technology to trace and curb insecurity across the country.


Hi all, welcome to our panel. This is about non-code contribution, and the premise of this is that hundreds of people are regularly contributing code, supporting build infrastructure, and collaborating with the fluency of Git and GitHub that's required to contribute to Kubernetes day-to-day, or what is believed to be required to contribute. This panel of people, we all are contributing in different ways. We're doing non-code contribution, and by that we mean, we contribute without needing to use Git or GitHub and are adding value in other ways to the ecosystem, and we want to tell you a little about that so that you're more aware of the broader range of contribution and to inspire you to do so if you're into it. So we've got a wonderful panel today. First, we'll just ask people to introduce themselves. Kazlin, will you kick us off? Sure, so hello everyone. I'm Kazlin Fields, and I'm a developer advocate at Google Cloud, and I'm a member of the Special Interest Group for Contributor Experience, where I'm a member of the Contributor Marketing Group, and we'll get into what that means more in a little bit. Good, and Kohei? Oh, hello. So actually I am from Japan, so I'm from the other side of the world in this group right now, so I'm recording in the morning right now. Yeah, so I'm Kohei, and I go by inductor on the internet, and I am an owner of SIGDOC's localization group for Japanese translation, so I basically translate Japanese, I mean, sorry, English to Japanese, then I also accept reviews and give LGTMs to the translators' contribution. That's amazing. And Kat? Hello everybody. My name is Kat Cosgrove, I'm a developer advocate at JFrog. I'm also a co-chair of Cloud Native TV, which you should have heard about by now, if not, stay tuned. I'm also one of the people responsible for the infamous Docker shim, Conflagration. Oh yeah, I remember that. Yeah, everybody does, unfortunately, and we'll talk about that later, or at least I will. But my contributions to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and the whole ecosystem have primarily been community and social media-based, so I will have a slightly different perspective. Yeah, and I'm Matt Broberg, I'm based out of the Midwest and appreciate, like, we're all in different places, so one of the advantages of this weird and wonderful virtual space is we can all be here together and do this talk. And I'm a red hat working on an editorial called Enable Architects. We write about IT architectures, but I've been contributing to CIG contributor experience for a couple years, and then I helped start the working group, upstream marketing slash contributor comms that Kazlan and I jam on, and we'll talk more about that. So maybe that's a good place to kick off. So how did you get started in this non-code contributing space for Kubernetes? I feel like, Kat, you started to go into Dockershim, and I feel like this is just a great starting place for us. Let's get into the weeds. Yeah, we'll just go straight into the fire. So I've never actually contributed code back to any CNCF project before, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. What I did do is get very heavily involved in the CNCF community. I used the tools, so I felt that it was important to give back to the community and at one point last year, there was a thing, is it last year? I don't, time is irrelevant at this point in the Panera, so it could have been a few months ago, it could have been last year, I'd believe you regardless of what you told me, but so in order to use the entire Docker tech stack as your container runtime inside of Kubernetes, Kubernetes requires a software shim, and we call that software shim Docker shim, its sole purpose is to get at the actual container runtime inside of the Docker stack, which I think is container D actually, but there was an announcement made that the Docker shim was going to be deprecated because it's a separate thing for the CNCF to maintain, that's kind of a pain, it's unfair. We've been talking about deprecating this thing for quite a while now, and the announcement of that deprecation created a lot of confusion initially, so I wrote a like 13 tweet long thread explaining what the Docker shim is and what's happening and why you shouldn't panic about this, and it immediately went viral to an extent that I was at the time extremely uncomfortable with because I wasn't used to having that much attention online, but this was ultimately an extremely positive contribution to the community. The CNCF underestimated the way that deprecation would affect some users and didn't really take into account what people knew about Docker shim. People tend to conflate Docker and Kubernetes a lot when they don't understand Kubernetes super well, which isn't a bad thing, it's entirely understandable, but it created a lot of drama and I helped solve that drama by being helpful and being a positive, non-judgmental source of information in the community, and that's an important contribution that any of you can make. Kat just mentioned about the Docker shim deprecation, right? I also was involved with that a little bit, so I basically saw a lot of dramas over there on Twitter and other social medias too. So yeah, Kat also posted the Kubernetes blog post, right? So we were basically in the Slack chat, we were discussing about how do we proceed, how do we post to make other people not panic anymore, right? So yeah, we were editing in the Google doc and collaborating to each other. And yeah, I helped that a bit. And also I posted the blog post in Japanese too because it was a really huge rage in Japan as well. Yeah, so yeah, a lot of people were really, I don't know how to describe this yet, but they're basically panicking, so yeah. Yeah, and you gave them what they needed in Japanese and it sounds like we're also helping with the English messaging, so that's incredible. That's a great combination of your skills and we needed everyone we could get that week in the Kubernetes community. It was an all-hands-on-deck situation for sure. Everybody was panicking and there was a dozen people in that Slack channel trying to cram together a blog post and an FAQ to stem the tide of people who were very scared and they didn't understand why they shouldn't be scared. The six hours were really dramatic. Very dramatic, extremely. We all deserve t-shirts for that, frankly. Oh, Docker Shim Fan Club, I feel like it's a really solid group that we can, maybe it's a new working group we can sponsor. Well, before we get too far down that inside joke, pulling it back up to other non-code contributions, Hazlyn, can you talk about what you've been up to? Yeah, so Matt will be thoroughly aware of the types of work that I've been doing with the community. To get into the community though, I'll talk a little bit about how I ended up here. Well, to start off, I developed an interest in Kubernetes and containers by having a bunch of friends who were just really interested in containers and Kubernetes. So over time, they got me involved in their hobbies, which was great, I always love it when people share their passions with me. So I got more and more involved in it and my career kind of started to shift towards Kubernetes and containers. And I wanted to get involved with the community because I've been to some Kubecons and some Meetups and I saw that everyone was so nice and everyone was always saying how wonderful it was to contribute and how everyone was welcome. So I started trying to find a place within the Kubernetes community. And I first started looking at maybe like SIG storage or SIG testing, because I come from a test engineer background. So I started looking at those, but with my workload at the time and the types of projects that those groups were doing, it kept not really working out, but then I found this contributor marketing group, which might sound a little weird. Marketing is in the title, so people are like, what does that mean? Sounds not that fun. I feel like some people feel that way. I hope this pitch is pivoting, but yeah. Yeah. I mean, engineers maybe not find it interesting. It's so true though. It's so true. Yeah, some people feel that way about it. But what I love about it is I get a really broad view over the Kubernetes ecosystem and I get to help people like Kat was saying. So our goal with the contributor marketing group is to tell the world about the wonderful things that Kubernetes contributors are doing and to help Kubernetes contributors connect with each other and see what each other is doing. So being able to get that overarching view of the SIGs and help them to communicate with the world, all of the awesome stuff they're doing is what gets me really excited about the work that we do in the contributor marketing team which involves things like blog posts. We also helped out with the Docker shim blog posts a little bit. You did, thank you. Yeah. And also the Twitter, we have a Twitter handle at Kat's contributors where we actually have a bot on GitHub so that any Kubernetes contributor who wants to participate in that Twitter account if they wanna tweet something about the work they're doing they can submit a tweet to the GitHub repo and we have a GitHub action that will turn that pull request into a tweet once it's merged into the repo, which is really cool. Oh, I didn't know that. That's so cool. That's a huge motivator for me. I love attention. That is cool. I love that. Please use it. Oh, I'm going to because I love attention, Gazzelin and that. And possibly by the time this goes live we have a PR in progress to make that so that somebody can just comment in a GitHub issue and once it gets approved as an issue it automatically sends the tweet. So you don't even need the PR or you don't need the Git foo that we're part of what we're saying is we're trying to create a home for people for more non-code contribution because there's so many talented people who are tweeting and translating and just and drawing their way into contribution and those are all valuable ways in which we expand our community. Yeah, we still need all of that. Like we desperately need all of that. Like can't just all be code. Then we have no personality and we have no community. So we need the flavor. Yeah, yeah. So Cazzelin, I cued you up a little. I just wanted to say like your artwork is incredible. And I feel like part of what- Yeah, I was about to say that too. Go for it, Kohei, go for it. Yeah, I love your comicalization. That's really amazing. That's so nice of you. So one way that I know some other people as well have started contributing to open source projects is to contribute their art skills. That's a great point for a non-code contribution. We've talked about blog posts. We've talked about translating documentation into many languages and another way is to help with illustration. I do illustrations for blog posts. I do my own little illustrations for talks and things. And so sometimes people ask me within the community to help them explain a concept and help to do it through visualizations. And that's one way that I really like to help people. So something I wanted to ask you all is like, what's something about non-code contribution that is like bringing a different sort of value to the community that people might not know about? First of all, it comes to mind for me to queue it up is like I'm really blown away at the people that volunteer their time to run events, especially in the year of the COVID. Like there have been people that have spent countless hours to curate experiences for us and to connect us despite us being very far away from each other and yes, very stressed and going through a lot collectively. There have been those moments of either jumping on like a short video or a Twitch stream or in animal crossing for some like just some place where people are getting together and feeling connected. I know that how much work that takes I'm not great at it myself and I'm so glad other people show up and do it.  I will literally always give a shout out to Austin Parker for the animal crossing conference for deserted island DevOps, which was a very, very heavily container technology because both myself and Ian Coldwater spoke at the first one, but that was, we caught lightning in a bottle with that conference and it remains the most wholesome, pure, uplifting conference experience of my entire life and it's my literal job to attend conferences. And I really don't think I could give him enough accolades for that. Running a conference is hard. Running events is hard, especially now. So literally anybody who is doing that now in a way that's still very community oriented deserves the biggest hug I'm allowed to give you as soon as it's safe because we're all trapped in our apartments and that is a really, really valuable contribution, right? People learn in different ways and some people need the social aspect in order to learn a new technology. I do personally, I read the docs by myself alone but then I want to watch somebody else hack it out and I can't do that without live events or virtual events or whatever. So big appreciation to anybody who is capable mentally of putting together a virtual event in present day. Also shout out to, I guess, KubeCon because we're doing that right now. That's literally what we're doing right now. Not nothing, it's pretty big. Well said, Kat. Thank you. Yeah, so I was actually really surprised when I firstly got involved with Kubernetes community because I just imagined like there would be just a bunch of a lot of awesome programmers that are considered as experts, right? But once I get involved, I see a lot of beginners, which is also a good thing, absolutely. And also there are a lot of subgroups called SIG, right? For example, SIG docs and SIG Contribute Experience just we were just talking about. And also this seems to be like I've never been involved with there, but SIG naming and SIG release, there are a lot of things that you don't have to necessarily have the great coding skills, but also you just basically need a common sense, right? Yeah. So there are actually a lot of technical writers and project managers, not just pure programmers, which is good. And there are a lot of areas of interest to there, which is so cool that people of different interests have different areas where they can do more contributing so that they can pursue their passions. Yeah, so in a way, it is okay for you to have like a biased opinion about things because there are a lot of people and who can discuss about it. So as long as the discussion is fine, that's fine. So like you don't have to have the whole interest, right? I want to contribute to this, but I don't want to contribute to this, that's fine, right? You can start from the small place. Yeah. That's really great universal advice. Like if you're newer and you're interested in contributing, you might see the list of 30 plus special interest groups, the SIGs, and be like, okay, maybe you'll just show up to each one of these real quick. And then you look at the year calendar and that's 40 plus hours of activity in less time than you have. So the acknowledgement that like you can choose a place and go contribute in your unique way. And we need expertise of all kinds, like product management is an expertise and product marketing and engineering and engineering management and just program and product management is wild. I'm seeing a lot more participation from people with those skill sets and scrum masters. It feels more friendly for newcomers this way because there are more specific options. You don't have to dive in with both feet this way. And also, if you don't know where you want to start because you're so new that all of this is overwhelming, that's what people like me and Kazlan are for. Like we are the like front facing community part of this. And I guess Matt to an extent too, don't you do that too, Matt? Yeah, I'm into it. So like that's what we're for. And you can talk to us, like just reach out to us and we're happy to answer questions and talk to you about this kind of stuff and help you find a home, like ultimately that's what we want. We want to build a better community which takes all kinds of people, whether you write code or not. And build better tools out of that. Like building good tools isn't just writing good code. And also, good code may or may not even actually exist. So... Yeah, constantly improving is probably the best goal we can set out these days. We've hit a lot of different topics all around non-code. So maybe we'll start going into what some advice you have for people who are interested and may not know how to start contributing to Kubernetes or contributing in a non-code way. Any advice that comes to mind that we haven't covered yet? I think as far as tech communities I've been involved in, which at this point is quite a lot, the CNCF is one of the most social and one of the most welcoming of all of them. So I would reiterate my previous advice and say just talk to us. I don't actually work for the CNCF. I am just a community member who ended up with a voice and stuck around. And that can be you too. And that for me started by just talking to people. And you don't need to be scared of any of us or anything, we're not untouchable. We would like to have you. So talk to us, please. And we'll find you a thing to do because there's stuff to do. There's like so much stuff to do. So we can find you some stuff to do. Should I go next? Yeah, I did it. I feel like the advice that I often give boiled down into kind of a single phrase is contributing to open source is learning in public. Something I was really intimidated by when I wanted to start getting involved with open source was I have no idea how to do this and I'm going to make so many mistakes. Everybody's going to find out that I don't know what I'm doing. But what I learned is that everybody doesn't know what they're doing sometimes. And we're all just doing it anyway because we really love these open source projects in our communities and the technology. And so we all work together and we learn in public. You can see our mistakes. They're out there to see. But we do our best to learn from them and move past them and all work together to make something really great. So you'll be learning in public, but it's okay. That's great advice. You know, everyone makes mistakes. And I think in a way, I would personally recommend as the first contribution, fixed typo is the best. Yeah, so good. You know, that's a known called correction and it's still contribution, right? Even like just removing this A from this typo would be a contribution. And your GitHub will grab the green color, right? We all want the green color. I have something to say on that subject. If you don't mind, Kohei. That's fine. Yeah. Go ahead. There's like this contra... People think that documentation contributions to open source projects are somehow like inherently less valuable than writing code. And I think that is a terrible and destructive and toxic mentality.  Yeah, like oftentimes the people writing the documentation, we're experts, okay? And that sounds great, but the reality is that being an expert makes it really easy to forget what it's like to not know something. So the documentation often ends up written from the perspective of somebody who is an expert. And yeah, that makes it way less approachable. It makes it so hard. I firmly believe that part of the reason why some of these tools have a reputation for being hard to learn is because they were hard for us to learn when we built them, but we haven't adapted the documentation. And so if you are a newbie and you are looking for a way to make a non-code contribution back to Kubernetes or you're looking for a way to like figure out the process for contributing to Kubernetes, please contribute documentation because it really is super, super valuable. I read docs and I love a good doc. I don't try to use a tool until I've read the docs. And because of the nature of my job, I am frequently a newbie on things. So newbie-centric documentation is super valuable and if you are new, I would love to have you, please. Absolutely, absolutely. I love the irony, but I'm going to say it anyway, that being a beginner is an expertise. It is. It definitely is. And being somebody who's continually learning new things, I think you bring an expertise of like, oh, I know what other people are going to stumble upon. Yeah. And if you have the skills to provide that back, amazing, do that. One thing I'd say is that like, when you're doing a distribution or contributing through GitHub, the whole pull request system is something we undervalue the complexity of. And it is a language to learn. It is painful. And there's very funny YouTube videos of people struggling through it. I've made some myself. So don't feel discouraged if you're not great at Git. Partner with somebody who's willing to help you. And that's what we're building in upstream marketing subgroup. We have a bunch of people that if you have a great idea of what to write, you've already written something up and you don't know how to get it into the system. We have a bunch of people that will help you get it into the system because you're right. Those ideas are needed.    Like big time, big time. I don't know what I'm doing. And it's like. That's a must have item. I have to buy that because I need it. If something goes wrong with a commit or a merge, I'm lost. I'm going to have to Google it. I'm going to have to Google it. If I have to reset, God help me. You know? I still have some trouble with the Git rebase too. That can be overwhelming. Oh yeah, those get messy. And it's okay to make these mistakes. We all do. We weren't born experts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some of us are just more comfortable screwing up in public. It is my job to screw up in public to an extent it's Kasselin's job to screw up in public. It's Matt's job to screw up in public. It's Tony's job to screw up in public so that you don't feel as bad about screwing up in public. Learning in public. Yeah, it's good. It's fun. It's fun down, but so it will definitely be an organic conversation. How do you all manage your time when it comes to contributing to Kubernetes? Because for some of us, it's part of our day jobs. For some of us, it's only volunteer base and there's going to be a mix of people that do that. How do you set those boundaries when there's just so much to do and so many places you could be communicating? Kasselin, do you want to kick us off? I can start. Time management is such a challenge for me in all aspects of managing work. There's so much work that I want to do and that I have so much fun doing. So that's a pretty good problem to have. Of course, there are also the things that are not as fun, so you've got to work those in there, too. But time management is actually something that I enjoy quite a bit. Like a lot of people, I think, I hop around between different tools and methodologies for managing my time for an open source contribution. Being on Slack is really key to being able to do that because being able to see what people are talking about and being involved in those conversations throughout the day helps me to keep in mind what my tasks are and then I have a lot of different tools that I use to manage those tasks like my planner that I have right here or my post-it notes all over my desk and sometimes I use online tools. It's a variety of things, but the main thing that really keeps me excited about the work and keeps me on task is talking with other people in the Slack. Cool. So you keep it present to keep on task. That's a cool strategy. Others want to jump in? So some parts of the way I contribute are time boxed and others are not. The way I contribute back to the community socially which is heavily through Twitter usage that's not time boxed. I will do that any time of the day or night. If it happens I will respond to it because it's low effort for me and also because I genuinely enjoy it. Other contributions this varies based on what you genuinely enjoy. What do you think is fun? What makes you happy? Other things I do time box really, really aggressively you will not see me making a pull request at like 10 a.m. on a Sunday or at 9 30 a.m. on a Wednesday. I don't do that. I'm very defensive of my personal time which I think is actually an important thing.  We want you to stick around for a long time and help us out. But as for like managing what I do when I agree with the like actively talking to people aspect is really, really important to me because I believe that you do you need all of the context you can get like I said earlier you can't assume what other people know so there has to be an exchange of information so Slack is super important Twitter is super important for me at least it might not be for you but definitely you need to be hanging out in Slack and again please don't burn out because we love you and we want you to stay. That's a really important point of view. Thank you. You're so nice. This is the first time the four of us have hung out and we're really enjoying it and we're planning trips to Japan. Yes, we got to get drinks. So, Kohei, how do you think about this? So from my point of view I will start by providing a different context so everyone, I mean if you're interested in contributing to a Kubernetes project or any like cncf project that means also means like that at some extent you want the badge on your GitHub right?  In order to get a membership of a project you have to keep contributing at some extent. I cannot say how long because it's different depending on which organization you want to get involved but yeah, so in order to keep contributing as just Kat said, you should not run out. That's something that you have to manage by yourself. So like time management is such an important factor to do that because personally I both I basically contribute for my work and not for my work because I didn't introduce myself as in I belong to Hewlett Packard Enterprise as a solution architect so I sometimes contribute to open source project because my clients are having issues right? In that case it's part of work but I also enjoy tech stuff by myself so like especially improving documentation such as like this getting started doesn't work right? Those things that's part of my hobby so thank you I'm trying to be so basically those things I think it's different from Kat because it's also part of my personal time so I do that on Wednesday in the very early morning or it could be really like middle of the night or it could be weekends but it's just my personal preference so you don't have to push yourself to do that you can just do it whenever you want right? Yeah if it's something you enjoy that's why the social media thing for me is like if you ask me a kubernetes question on twitter I'll just answer it because I enjoy it. And for some people we'll be exhausted by that yeah so like my best way to manage the time is not to manage the time just do it when you want to do it that sounds ironic but I think it's the for myself it makes the best you know efficient. Yeah it takes time to manage it to do this so like if you can trust your intuition on and just play like kubernetes community as a playground I think that's a beautiful way to use it and be part of it. Yeah I use it as a toy. Yeah and that's cool we appreciate it and you know I wanted to ask this question because I find it so complex for people and it's the most common thing I hear is like how do I contribute when do I contribute and for me like I found that so my job is not directly to contribute to kubernetes but I'm at a huge vendor and it's a lot of value from people like me being in this type of community so I found like many people, I can't say most many people have enough flexibility in their week where they can carve a few hours and choose what to do with it and for me that is kubernetes contribution it is a few hours a week it's no more than four during the work day occasionally sometimes out of the work day just to banter with people much like cohe but because of that I've been able to slowly integrate it more into my day job because lo and behold when results show up people are excited about what I'm doing so at first it was just for me but I pitched it well enough that it's now for us as well and I think if you're at kubernetes and you're listening to this you might be in a similar position where you could maybe grow your role that way if it interests you we'll take that first initiative of just carving off time and asking for forgiveness instead of permission and just doing good work and being a community member getting that little badge and then celebrating that afterwards so very cool it's cool to hear how all of you do it and I definitely love the social media aspect too I'm way too active on twitter or maybe just active enough just active enough all right well we're just about to run out of time let's do a quick wrap up anything let's just do around the horn say like one thing you're thankful for or no what do you want to do final advice I guess there we go that's a much better conclusion final tldr too long didn't read advice I'll start you have valuable contributions everybody like listening to this watching this you have something to contribute that we find valuable you might think to yourself oh you know I don't know I don't know anything I don't know what I'm doing that's still valuable the fact that you don't know what you're doing and we do like we need that perspective too so you're all valuable in some way so if you want give it to us Kohei please fix our typos and also if you ever speak any other language than English it's another way to contribute too so localization projects has a lot of languages such as Spanish Korean also Japanese being myself that's where you can contribute as well because you can actually communicate with other contributors in your language which is advantage it's huge yeah that's such a great one yeah so please fix typos and my final word of advice would be don't give up there were a couple of times where I tried to get involved with the community when it just didn't work out it wasn't the right timing and that's okay I still wanted to be involved and I still eventually got involved so if you're struggling to get involved right now that's okay we'll still be here for you just keep chugging and we'll try our best to help you get involved oh that's beautiful alright with that thank you so much from this noncode contribution panel thank you to Kat to Kohei to Kazlin and thank you for watching see you out there bye bye


Hi! Hey everyone! Hello, hello! Linda here with ITTT back for another live session this week. How's everybody doing? I hope everybody has had a great week so far. Maybe you have something fun planned for the weekend. Yeah, if you can see me, if you can hear me clearly, please just leave like a high in the comment box. That'd be really great. So I know that everything is working well here. And as you can see today's topic, this is what we're going to talk about today. All the documents that you will need for teaching English abroad. All the documents that you need to prepare, that you need to have ready in order to go abroad and start teaching English. As always, please don't forget to like and subscribe so you don't miss any of our other upcoming live sessions. We go live once a week, every week, same day, same time, pretty much. And yeah, so we every week there's a different topic usually. And every first Friday of the month I do a just general like Q&A session where you can ask me any kinds of questions about TEFL, TESOL, teaching abroad, teaching English online, whatever. And today we are talking about this topic right here. And as always, we also very exciting have a 30% off opportunity. So 30% of any TEFL or TESOL course from ITTT today. So if you're thinking about getting TEFL or TESOL certified, you're not yet certified, or you want to upgrade, you get you want to get a higher level certificate, you can do this with our discount code. So you can either scan the QR code right here. Or I also have a link for you that I'm going to share in the comments section real quick. Give me one second. Yeah. Here. Looks like this. Down below you can copy paste this link and then fill out your application and you'll get a 30% discount. Any TEFL or TESOL course from ITTT to get you started with your international teaching career or online teaching career, whatever you prefer. Yep. So that's basically what we're going to do today. And I also would really like to know where you are right now. Where in the world are you watching from today? What time is it there? How are you doing? Just let me know a little bit about what's happening with you. And I am actually in South Korea right now. It is 10 a.m. Friday morning. So I'm getting ready to jump into the weekend very soon. Very excited about that. But before I do, I'm here for you guys with this topic. So where are you watching from? What time is it? Do you have any plans for the weekend? Let me know in the comment box. That would be really, really great. I always like to ask during these live sessions, if you're watching for the first time, I always also like asking you guys questions and we have an exchange of information, basically. It's not just me talking and giving you information. Obviously, that's the main thing, but I also want to know a little bit more about you and learn a little bit more about you guys and what's up with you. So let me know. Don't be shy in the comment section. Let me know where you are right now and what time it is. And then we can jump into our topic for today. All right. I hope that sounds like a good plan. Let me take a sip of my drink right here while I'm still waiting for some answers to come through. I hope everything is working well. I haven't had any comments coming through yet, but we'll see. I just want to make sure everything works as it should before we jump into the topic. So just even if you just leave a little emoji in the comments, just give me something or I'm going to check on my end here if everything is working before we jump in. Let me see. So we are actually live on Facebook and on YouTube at the same time. So just checking. Oh, it looks like I think it looks like it's working. Yeah. Okay. Should be working. So yeah, let's just jump in and I'm going to first let you guys know who I am if you are watching for the first time.  So my name is Linda. I'm a travel writer and content creator under the name Linda goes East East because I've always been really interested in teaching or not teaching traveling and living in Asia, but also teaching obviously, but just general interest in Asia. So that's why Linda goes East and I have my own website Linda goes East.com. So if you're interested in Asia, teaching in Asia, traveling, moving abroad to Asia, specifically China and South Korea, do check it out. It will be very useful for you on Instagram. I'm also very active over there. So if you're also an Instagram, I'd appreciate if you just head over there, give me a follow and reach out to me at Linda goes East. I'm originally from Germany and the US. And like I said, I am based in South Korea and I also lived in China and I also taught English in China before I moved to South Korea, but I've been in South Korea now for seven years already. So that's that. And we have Daniel here watching this live broadcast from Mexico. Oh, awesome. Awesome, Daniel. What time is it in Mexico and what city are you in? Cool. And I'm also, this is the other side, a TEFL and TESOL marketing professional for ITTT. What is ITTT, you ask? ITTT stands for International TEFL and TESOL Training. And so, yeah, ITTT is a leading TEFL and TESOL course provider worldwide. We provide TEFL and TESOL training for people who want to be English teachers abroad or online or in their home country, whatever you want to do, anything that has to do with teaching English professionally, that's what we're doing. You can find us at TEFLcourse.net and also on all the other social media platforms and especially on Instagram, where we are international TEFL training. And like I said, we are operating worldwide. We have a great variety of different TEFL and TESOL courses. If you take a look at TEFLcourse.net, you'll see all the different course options. We have online courses, in-class courses, combined courses. So there's something for everyone. I'll promise you that. You'll find something. And yeah, just reach out to us and we will help you find the perfect course for you. You'll let us know what your goal is, where you want to teach, what do you want to do with a TEFL or TESOL certificate, and we will give you a consultation and recommend the best possible option for you in your case. Okay. Very good. Also, guys, still let me know where you're watching from, where you are right now. Let me know in the comments. We only had Daniel so far saying that he is watching from Mexico. So very exciting. I also want to know where the other watchers are watching from, the other viewers. Let me know. And then we are going to talk about this topic today. I think there's nothing more to mention before we jump in. Again, just don't forget to like and subscribe so you don't miss any of our upcoming live sessions. Like I said, we do this on a weekly basis. Every week, there's a new topic completely free. You don't even need to be an ITTT graduate or member or anything. But if you like and subscribe, you just get notified and you're not going to miss any of the live sessions. And also check us out on Facebook. Our Facebook page is filled with teaching materials that you can use in your classroom or just information for people who want to be English teachers and also job offers. So that's also something to keep in mind. Great. Here we have Khaled watching from Morocco. Hey, awesome. Also, Otman from Morocco. Very cool. If I butcher any of your names, I'm very, very sorry about that. We have Rudeen watching from Thailand. Awesome. And Byron from Ecuador. Cool. Very international crowd here. Love it. Thank you so much for watching and tuning in. Taking some time out of your day to spend it with me. I really, really appreciate that. And then we can jump into our topic for today. So teaching abroad, all the documents that you will need to teach English abroad. Obviously, if your plan is to teach English abroad, you can't just jump on the plane, fly to the destination and start teaching. There's a lot of paperwork involved. Obviously, you could just jump on a plane and teach a guess, but it's not going to be legal in most cases. So you need to do this the legal way, the right way. And there's just a lot of documents involved. These obviously also depend and they vary from country to country. So not every country has the same laws and regulations. So you're going to need some documents for one country that you're not going to need for another country. So it really depends on where you want to go. This is just a general overview. So I recommend, as always, doing your own research or just reaching out to us directly and asking us, Hey, how is it specifically for Thailand? How is it specifically for China, for Peru, for wherever? Because it just varies from country to country. But these documents are just a general collection of documents that you're going to need in most cases. All right, let's start. So I split up these documents into three categories. We have number one, the essential documents. Those are the documents that you're going to need, no matter what. Pretty much anyone is going to need those documents, no matter where you're going to teach in the world. It doesn't matter. Everybody's going to need these documents. Number two is the just in case you need them documents. So they are sometimes required by countries and sometimes they're not. So it depends on the specific case that you're going to be in. So you need to just ask your employer or the embassy or whatever. So we're going to talk a little bit more about that in the second point. And then the third point are the wait until you arrive documents. So those are the documents that you're going to you're going to get once you are in the country in the country where you want to teach it. Number one and number two are the documents that you need to prepare before you are leaving your home country. All right, Daniel's saying it's 813 p.m. It's been raining for two days in Mexico City house the weather like in South Korea. Today's very nice. We have blue skies but here too it's been raining on and off the last couple of days. But it's pretty good. It's warm a little humid but it's not rainy season yet. We're going to have rainy season I think next month or in August. So it's quite nice at the moment. Okay. So those are the three categories we're going to talk about. First we're going to have a look at the essential documents. So let's have a look at that. Essential documents. I'm sure everybody can guess kind of what those are oh and I'm going to make myself smaller so you can actually read that. So essential documents everybody is going to need for going abroad obviously a passport but what's important for the passport is that it needs to be valid for at least two years in most cases. Most countries they will not let you in if your passport has less than six months validity. So that's usually this for traveling to most of the time your passport needs to be valid for at least six months in order to enter another country and then most of the time at least one year is required when applying for visas and work permits. So we just always recommend having a passport that's valid for at least two years. So you're safe. You don't need to worry about renewing it. It can be quite a hassle to renew a passport in a different country depending on where you're from. I have some friends here in South Korea their country doesn't even have an embassy here. So they actually need to go back to their country and renew it there and some countries are like that. They don't let you renew a passport in a different country. You need to actually do this at home in your home country. Some countries some embassies obviously do allow that. So but it's a lot of work and I I went through that recently. I had to renew. I have two passports so I had to renew both of them in the last two-ish years and it's always a hassle and just make sure you have a passport that's valid for at least two years. You're going to be good. You're not going to have to worry about anything and like I said for in most cases countries will not even let you in if your passport has less than six months validity. So that's an important point and also another point if you are traveling a lot let's say and you get a lot of stamps in your passport you want to make sure that you still have enough pages empty pages for other stamps for when you're going to your new country because that's also a reason why you can get rejected if there's no more space in your passport. So just make sure you have that. Then you're also going to need obviously a high quality and Tefl based CV or resume and this is actually mine here on the side. My resume so what I mean with that is that you should make sure that your CV obviously is up to date and is relevant for the type of jobs you are applying for. So maybe you're you've applied for jobs in the past they are not teaching jobs or Tefl abroad teaching abroad jobs so just make sure you tweak your CV or resume and make it relevant to teaching and to teaching abroad. That means highlighting your Tefl qualifications make sure they're on there they're mentioned in the resume along with any observed teaching practice that you've had or lesson planning that was involved. So make sure you put that on there that that is a skill that you have. There's usually you would you can put this obviously here in the certificate section and for Tefl or TESOL you can then kind of put this in in parentheses saying like strong focus on lesson planning and observe teaching practice for example. If you haven't had any experience in teaching before you can put on your resume any kind of volunteer work that you've done any kind of management experience even if it's just like a summer camp you were a group leader or anything like that or tutoring experience any kind of work in a team environment you should put that on there if you don't have any teaching experience or work experience at all yet any kind of experience like that volunteer work management experience group team environment anything like that put that on your resume that's going to look very good for teaching. So those are two things there are two more essential documents so just keep those in mind passport and resume and then we also have a unique and meaningful cover letter right you're also going to need a cover letter and you should avoid using a standard template. For these kinds of jobs when you google like cover letter or teaching cover letter or whatever many people are going to use the same thing and employers are they know if it's a template so just be careful of course you can use templates but don't use just one template but kind of mix and match from three four different ones so it's not obvious it is a template and in your cover letter make sure you highlight why you want to teach abroad why you have chosen this country in particular and why you want to work with this school in particular. So those three why's you should answer and what you should not say why you want to teach abroad and why you want to go to this particular country for like traveling pleasure leisure any kinds of things obviously yes we do want to go to this country because we're interested we want to explore it more but just don't make it sound like you're just going there to travel and to have a good time they're hiring an employee a teacher so you just word it a little bit differently if that makes sense so just say highlight why you want to teach abroad to broaden your horizons or maybe you've always had this interest in this particular country or because your aunt lives there or your parents traveled there in their youth or whatever find some kind of reason why you are interested in this particular country what about the culture is it that you're interested in why did you choose this place and why did you choose this school you can just find a small reason why this particular school because you've heard many good things about this chain or whatever something like that just important don't make it sound like you're just going there to travel and have a good time another thing you are going to need most in most cases are reference letters so even if they're not required it's always good to have one or two reference letters from a former teacher perhaps or a college professor even or even a workplace manager or coworker they can add some real weights to your job applications some schools they even want to they even require references and they are actually going to call these references or reach out to them via email anyway they are going to contact them sometimes so be sure to let the person know that you mention them as a reference and kind of tell them a little bit about what they should say brief them a little bit so they are ready for that conversation should it happen and yeah just have these reference letters so you can also google this you know the structure of a reference letter but it's basically just a letter from this person talking about you and why you are the ideal candidate for this school why you're a great teacher why you would make a great teacher anything like that so just a reference letter one or two reference letters should be part of your application portfolio basically all right so for number one essential documents we had the passport with a minimum of two years of validity recommended we have a teffel based high quality cb resume don't use just one template kind of mix and match from different templates and make it relevant to teaching then we have the unique and meaningful cover letter here again also don't use a template for this one and highlight why you want to go to this country why why do you want to teach abroad why this particular school and don't make it sound like you want to just travel and have a good time and also make sure you have good reference letters so these are the essential documents next up we have the just in case you need them documents so sometimes you will need these for some countries you will need these some other countries you're not going to need them it depends on also the not only the country you're going to teach in but also the employer so sometimes maybe the employer they request something extra from you those are these documents so first one or actually two here the first one that's very popular in some countries is a criminal record background check and now this the name of this document depends varies from country to country in the US it's called the FBI background check in other countries it might have a different name but this document basically proves that you have a clean record and nothing to hide you don't have you didn't do anything any crime you didn't commit a crime in the past or anything like that this is especially especially places like Korea they require that and I believe also Japan so some countries in Asia and also in the Middle East they always require a background check and this is often part not only the school requires it but the the government so for issuing your work visa so yeah whether or not you're going to need this document depends on where you are working but with this one at least from my experience these kinds of documents they take time so make sure you research as early as possible whether or not you are going to need this document so that you have enough time to get it ready and prepare it in the US there are actually some services that will help you with that getting the criminal background check there are express express services and there are also places that will help you with the stamps but it again takes time and if you want to have express it costs a lot of money so make sure you just start especially this process as early as possible the other thing we have is a university degree apostilled and notarized so what is an apostill an apostill we see that here on the page in the paper it's on the right side of this page it's this paper so an apostill is an international certification that's comparable to a notarization in domestic law it normally supplements a local notarization of the document so a notarized document is typically only valid in the country where it's issued but since you are going abroad to a different country you're also going to need an apostill an apostill is an international certification that proves that this document is real so in most cases you are going to need that as well especially like i said in asia in the middle east they always kind of want to have an apostill on your university degree this is not on your original this is usually done on a copy so there are many services that you can use to get this done you can do google search i've done this for the us there are services where you can do this you can just search university degree apostill and you're going to find many results so basically you send them i think they need to actually even see the original and the copy together and you're going to get the original back and the copy will be apostilled something like that so and again this process can take some time and it's also it costs some money so just be aware that and like i said research as early as possible if you are if you need this or not so just ask us either or do your research call the local embassy and ask if that is a requirement all right next we have the university transcripts so in some cases you're actually going to need sealed university transcripts they're not widely necessary again except in south korea and most countries in the middle east i also needed that so this looks like this you are not allowed to open these it needs to be sealed like that and the way you can get these is just by contacting your your university and tell them hey i need sealed university transcripts for you know teaching abroad or whatever and they can provide them to you also passport photos you have a passport already with a photo in it but in most cases you're also going to need additional passport photos and they are required with almost everything every official form or document so it is a visa application you need to put a photo on any kind of other application most of the time you need to put a photo on so it's just good to have some extra passport photos on hand that you can use and with that it's important to remember to have a white background and to dress in a professional manner we all know that i i hope dan yellow saying we want to teach abroad because we're passionate about english helping potential students to achieve their english goals is our primal motivation yeah that's a great sentence or a great reason to put into your cover letter for sure something like that not saying we want to teach english abroad because i want to travel the world and try lots of new food even though that's true for me at least but doesn't sound great in a job application so good this is great good job daniel yep okay awesome so these are the just in case you need them documents and there are more no there are no more so these were again the criminal background check the university degree that's appostilled the appostill and the university transcripts and the additional passport photos again these are the just in case you need them documents they are not required by all the countries not acquired by all the employers so it depends on where you are going to be working at then you might need them so it's important to do as much research as early as possible so that you have enough time to get all these documents ready okay and then the third category is the wait until you arrive documents so these are the documents that you are going to get when you're already in the new country all right so here we have things like work visa or permit so on the left here this is what it looks like in China here and in South Korea when you first you apply for the visa and etc in your home country at the Chinese embassy at the Korean embassy whichever embassy and then in many cases once you are then in the country you go to a local government office and you get an ID card or hear a work permit this is also a work permit so that's usually how it works and don't worry in 99% at a time the employer helps with this process because they've been through that with other teachers they know what to do they are there with you they take you to go to these offices and to get those cards and work permits and visas and etc but just confirm with your employer what specific documentation you need to bring with you these are usually a mix of these documents that we just mentioned the just-in-case documents and the essential documents you're going to need to bring those many times you're also going to need to bring originals so make sure you bring that with you you have that in a binder safe with you when you travel abroad and also confirm what kind of initial entry visa you need so in some countries it's actually okay to just enter the country on a tourist visa and then you can get the work permit in the in the new country but in many other cases you actually need to enter the country through a work visa already and then just exchange it into this card so it depends on the country but your employer will know how to do this or if you're going for a recruiter they will also know and they will help you with that you're not alone at this stage because that's part of the employer's job that they get you to the country to the school and ready to teach so that's the one thing work visa and work permit and the other thing that we see a lot is medical tests that you need to go through once you are there there's also the case for example in South Korea I did that too and your employer will also take you there and help you with that but for example a work permit application in Thailand also requires a test for syphilis for example and in Saudi Arabia you might even need to do a HIV AIDS test so this again varies from country to country this was not the case I did not have to do that in Korea obviously but again it depends from country to country so your employer will know this your recruiter will know this they will let you know they will help you walk you through the process you're not alone just be aware that these are things that you need to get done once you are there and maybe now with the COVID era maybe you also need to have already vaccines you need to show proof of vaccination again this depends on from country to country so there's no clear one answer if you need that or not just speak with your employer and if still in doubt you can ask the local embassy if you need that or not and in general any other vaccines that are recommended for your chosen destination I would make an appointment with your doctor and tell him hey I want to go teach abroad in Chile for a year what kind of vaccines do you recommend and then just get those or just check if you need any vaccines that have expired and refresh them get new ones just stuff like that and this process again can take some time I recently had to renew a vaccine and it's a three dose vaccine and you need to wait a couple of weeks or months in between them so just make sure you start as early as possible with these kinds of things so you don't run out of time okay I think okay this is it for the wait until you arrive documents obviously for other countries maybe there is more to add to this list it again depends varies from country to country so there's no one list but these are the ones that we see the most so let's recap real quick we spoke about the essential documents which is a passport valid for at least two years just to be safe so you don't have to worry about renewing anything make sure you have enough empty pages in your in your passport for stamps or you might get rejected a high quality taffle based CV or resume make sure you put a lot of effort into that and also a unique and meaningful cover letter same thing and prepare some reference letters two maybe three even different references from professors teachers co-workers bosses anything these are the essential documents these you should definitely have and have ready next we talked about the just in case you need them documents this is your criminal background check your university degree with epistel your sealed university transcripts and just additional passport photos these are not always necessary but they are just in case you need them so again this this these documents should involve research and ask your employer if you need them ask your recruiter if you need them for that specific destination where you're planning to go I wouldn't just go out and get them because they cost money they cost time so just double check if you really need them and if you don't need them you don't need to get them save them money save that time and then we have a third category which was the wait until you arrive documents these were the documents to get once you're already in the country which includes things like work permit work visas the little cards that you get and medical tests that you need to do in order to be accepted in order to get that work visa in many cases and again this medical stuff also just make an appointment even before you leave with your doctor and ask him if there are any recommended vaccines for this region or that country that you should get this is the recap these are the documents all the essential documents that you will need for teaching English abroad let me know in the comments now if you have any questions if anything was not clear and I'll be happy to elaborate and get back to you or also Q&A if you have any other questions not relating to today's topic you're also more than welcome to ask away this is the end of today's topic so we have time to cover some other questions that you might have also feel free to take a beautiful screenshot of this so you have it ready as always you can always as always you can always watch the replay right we are live right now but our live videos are always they always stay in our playlists on youtube on facebook you can always refer back to them that's what i wanted to say all right i'm going to give you five seconds to take the screenshot or you can just pause five four three two one okay all right and this is how you can find ittt online again itt t stands for international tefl and t-cell training we offer a wide variety of different tefl and t-cell courses and we do have this 30% off opportunity for you today so you can scan this qr code fill out your application for a tefl or t-cell certificate certificate course and get 30% off if you can't scan the qr code again i do have a link for you so you can just copy paste this link i'm gonna share that one more time with you guys in the comment section you can refer to it have a look looks like this all right and then yeah qna is open now so if you have any questions about what i just talked about about the documents or about anything else related to teaching abroad teaching online teaching korea um tefl t-cell any of our course options anything now is your opportunity to ask the question before i sign up for today so do let me know i am here and ready also maybe what i can show you guys real quick is my certificate oh and it's blurry need to turn off the blurriness how do i do that oh no not that oh here i believe yes okay this is what the certificate looks like from itt tefl certificate these certificates what the what the great thing is they never expire they are good for life um and yeah it's a really nice certificate what we also offer what is sometimes required um what i didn't mention by some either countries or employers that you need to have an extra notarized stamp on this this is something that we can help you with i know that um china and vietnam they require that and a tefl certificate is also something that you need to have in many cases for your work visa for teaching english abroad so you actually need to take the certificate to the embassy when you apply for the work visa in that country it's also something that i went through and in some cases like i said you need this additional notarized stamp which we can also help you with so if you need that you can let us know and we will prepare that for you just wanted to show you guys real quick what that all looks like okay all right and then here we have a question from larney hi larney hi i just got in wanted to know if my certificate is still valid 120 hour t sol certificate yes so actually these certificates like i just said they never expire so if you have a certificate from itt t yes i took it more than a year ago it is still valid it never expires larney so you're good to go you don't need to do any refresher you're good more than a year i got mine this one hold on when did i get it 2015 so this is already seven years old it never expires it's good for life larney so you're all good to go however if you do need any kind of additional stamp you can let us know and we'll help you with notarization or we can maybe help you find a notar in your area that can do that if you need that so yep they never expire that's a great thing about these certificates obviously it's good to you know if you took a tefl certificate tefl core is like 15 years ago it'd be good to do some kind of refresher there's so many materials you know just dive in maybe get a book about teaching skills because there has been a lot of change or you can just do a quick like refresher tefl cores not the full 120 hour course but like a smaller one for yeah refreshing daniel says congratulations on your certification linda yeah thank you i actually have four of these so this is the 120 hour one that i got in 2015 and i also have three other ones the specialization ones um teaching english to young learners teaching business english and teaching online so i have four tefl certificates again they all never expire so um yeah that's great i hope you get yours soon too when did you finish it all right larney yeah so please reach out to us via email and our consultants our admins course administrators they will get back to you okay this is the email address courses at tsalt-tefl.com you just ask us for that and we'll get back to you okay awesome all right good good questions thank you so much for that anybody else have any questions while i'm still here i'm all ears for your questions or any comments suggestions feedback let me know any topic ideas for upcoming live sessions i'm always looking forward to those what what what would you like me to talk about in the future let me know you're welcome larney very welcome think about anything else i can mention about the certificate i think we covered everything i'm going to stay on a couple more minutes now if anybody has a question now is your final chance to ask a question okay before we sign up and again we do have 30 percent off uh in the comments i shared the link if you're interested in getting tefl or tesol certified or maybe get some additional tefl or tesol certifications like i mentioned the specializations in teaching english to young learners teaching business english teaching online or even a diploma in tesol you can do so with 30 percent off with this code it will save you a lot of money just putting it out there all right well just give it a couple more seconds there is always a delay so there's a bit of a delay between me talking and the new guys hearing it so i just want to make sure that everyone has the opportunity to ask a question if they want to i don't want to sign off too soon so if you're not sure if you're you know there are no stupid questions i always say you can ask away no problem anything that's on your mind i'm here but we can also don't forget just don't forget to like and subscribe and we can you can come back again next time maybe you have a question in the meantime write it down ask me next time also cool or you can just reach out to me here on instagram at linda goes east if you don't want to ask here in front of everybody in front of the world you can just DM me privately and i will get back to you that way also fine no problem all right then maybe i'm just gonna say goodbye now just gonna give it let's give it 30 more seconds last chance for someone to ask a question oh there's a comment oh there's a topic suggestion suggestion for next live sessions teaching abroad challenges that fresh students might experience as they move to their target country that's a great idea i'm gonna just take a picture of that with my phone that's a really really good idea awesome thank you daniel that's great i am going to look into that and prepare that that's great i like that topic definitely definitely there's so many challenges and i think that's also part of what a lot of what holds a lot of people back their worries um so that would be a great topic of maybe kind of um just provide support and you know that you know that it's okay you don't need to worry about these things yes there are challenges but you can overcome them and um there's a lot of support out there you are not doing this alone yeah that's a good topic thank you i love it all right then i am going to sign off i'm gonna say goodbye now and um yeah thank you so much for taking time out of your day today and spend it with me um if you have any questions let me know at lindegos east on instagram and again you can always reach out to us via email courses at tsong-teffel.com we'll be here again next week same day same time um just like and subscribe and you will get the notifications for upcoming live sessions uh we have here liturg i was late watching your live session i will watch this again this topic is helpful to us thank you happy friday thank you litter happy friday to you as well that's the great thing about replay you can always watch it again you can skip to the parts that interest you so that's also that's great all right then i'm gonna sign off today and thank you again and i hope to see you all again next time i'm gonna say bye bye now have a great weekend bye guys