Disclaimer for John B. Kirk’s AOK Basic Skills Project
The AOK Basic Skills Project is the individual retirement project of John Kirk. It isn’t a business, registered entity, or organization. The “AOK Basic Skills Project” is the name of its Internet domain. It is a nonprofit effort to help people of all ages learn about important educational and diet skills. The workshops are free for the organization providing the presentation and for the individual receiving it.
AOK Workshops were originally the charitable extension of JBK English, an English language school in Quito, Ecuador. They were taught by John Kirk and were educational, noncommercial, and free of charge. The Servicio de Rentas Internas (SRI), or the Internal Revenue Service of Ecuador, gave JBK English permission to teach English, loan professional services, and do other types of teaching. However, AOK Workshops is now operating from Portland, Maine in the U.S. mostly by Zoom to Latin America.
John takes no credit for the teaching approaches, methods or materials he uses in the AOK Basic Skills Project workshops. In the case of the 10 English language learning workshops he has presented and distributed, they are strongly associated with the European Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment (CEFR) and the European Language Portfolio (ELP) with the Council of Europe; the Global Language Portfolio (GLP) for adults; and Linguafolio for children and adolescents, which is the American version of the ELP.
The Internet materials of these organizations are freely available for non-commercial, educational and individual use. In the AOK Workshops, this is also the case with most of the free English teaching/learning websites which are freely distributed to the participants.
In the case of the six supplementary educational workshops he teaches and distributes – for pre-school, elementary, secondary, and three levels of adult basic education – John bases his teaching on an overview of basic international educational objectives for the different grade levels, which are taught through free websites.
He has also provided handouts for some of the popular teaching strategies and techniques in N. America which encourage reading and writing. He has chosen the skills and websites based on his own experience as a teacher. As with the ESOL websites, these websites are freely available for noncommercial, educational, personal use.
For the workshop Whole Foods for Busy People: How to Save Time & Money with “One-Dish Meals”, Easy Recipes, and Cooking Ahead, he uses websites from both the USDA and the university extension services it supports, as well as a number of private ones. The theme of this workshop is helping the food insecure. He will be trying to make it available to full text data bases in Latin and North America, as well as offering it a number of Ministries and NGO’s that work with food insecurity.
In the case of the vaporized yeast bread baking classes for young children populations and in risk of stunting, the Ministry of Health in Ecuador has standardized his recipes for children’s centers for the Province of Pichincha. He is trying to promote these clases through Latin America because many people there don’t have ovens.
John has referenced the recipes and cooking methods to their owners through their websites and names where possible. The techniques used are for augmenting the amount of protein in their diets without the use of an oven. He has adjusted/rewritten some of the recipes on his own.
The websites referred to in these workshops belong to the respective corporations, companies, public institutions, and individuals indicated on their pages. That they are for noncommercial, educational and personal use is one reason why John doesn’t ask for remuneration for his presentations or sharing of workshop materials.
One of the long term objectives of John’s workshops is to encourage UNICEF to offer basic digital instruction. Another is to offer materials on independent learning for the workshop participants who might need it.
Participation in these and other AOK workshops is free and without obligation. If any of the content on the websites involved in an AOK workshop is of an inappropriate nature, please contact John at kirkjohnb5@gmail.com and he will gladly remove the site from the links he has provided.
John B. Kirk, Director
AOK Basic Skills Project
Portland, Maine
E: kirkjohnb5@gmail.com
W: www.aokbasicskills.gratis