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1. Description of Our Community
Our school, Master's Academy and College is based on a former Canadian military base in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Part of our college program includes yearly service trips to countries like Trinidad, Belize, Rumania and St Lucia. Here students and teacher mentors work together to improve living conditions for needy people. One of these teams is a work team that takes used playgrounds from the city of Calgary to developing countries. Elementary and middle school students from Master's Academy have the chance to contribute financially these service projects by buying lunchtime hotdogs and hamburgers and by affirming the college students and their adult leaders. Our 2005 CyberFair project, 'Playgrounds That Travel' hopes to encourage the people who take their spring vacation each year to build playgrounds in countries who don't have a place for their children to Our school, Master's Academy and College is based on a former Canadian military base in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Part of our college program includes yearly service trips to countries like Trinidad, Belize, Rumania and St Lucia. Here students and teacher mentors work together to improve living conditions for needy people. One of these teams is a work team that takes used playgrounds from the city of Calgary to developing countries. Elementary and middle school students from Master's Academy have the chance to contribute financially these service projects by buying lunchtime hotdogs and hamburgers and by affirming the college students and their adult leaders. Our 2005 CyberFair project, 'Playgrounds That Travel' hopes to encourage the people who take their spring vacation each year to build playgrounds in countries who don't have a place for their children to play safely.
2. Summary of Our Project
In 'Playgrounds That Travel', the Grade Six students have told a story that had it's beginnings at Master's Academy and College. In the four years since that story began the story has traveled far beyond the walls of this school in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. For this project, each student took responsibility for creating a web page for at least one of topic. They worked diligently to interview people who were part of taking playgrounds to developing countries and learned how to use the FrontPage program so they could create a web page to house their topic. The end result has been compelling and a testimony to the hard work of these students.
3. Our Computer and Internet Access
A. Percentage of students using the Internet at home:more than 50%
B. Number of workstations with Internet access in the classroom:more than 6
C. Connection speed used in the classroom:dedicated connection
D. Number of years our classroom has been connected to the Internet:more than 6
4. Problems We Had To Overcome
- Many different lunch hour clubs are offered for middle school students at Master's Academy. It was difficult to find a day that didn't have a club already scheduled. Some CyberFair students had the challenge of meeting their obligations for more than one lunchtime club. - There wasn't enough lunch hours. By the end of the project we had to open up additional work times so we could finish on time. - Mr Ness was the only person that knew the background history of 'Playgrounds That Travel'. Since most of the project students have graduated and left the school, we had to rely on Mr. Ness for most of the information. Mr. Ness generously gave up many of his own lunch hours so that he could meet with CyberFair students- answering their many, many questions. - We lost project members along the way. Some students hadn't done any work on their page and so our existing CyberFair students had to pick up the slack by working on more than one web page.
- We would have liked to have included some audio interviews but we ran out of time.
- There wasn’t enough of Mrs. Dyck to go around. It would be helpful to have another person to help with technology issues. - Coming down to extra work times that fit everyone’s schedules - Missing school days that CyberFair was on - No sound on most of our computers - Hard to keep up with other school work while we worked on this project. Sometimes we had to miss lunch hour tutorials for math and LA because CyberFair took place on that day. This required students to find other times to meet for tutorials. - the FrontPage program developed soem glitches that we were not able to solve. For exmaple, the font changed and try as we might, we were not able to get the font to remain being 'Arial' throughout the pages.
We overcame these problems by working on additional lunch hours, and having an after school work bee. Because Mr. Ness really believe din our project work, he met with us whenever we needed to. Many of our project members were more than willing to do extra work. We are very grateful to him for that! and by making use of non-digital materials whenever we could. Many of our problems were tackled by 'sticking with it' and the students didn't let the glitches along the way deaden their enthusiasm to make this project a reality.
5. Our Project Sound Bite
The last night we worked on the project the students decided to create a white board message to me. It was full of their positive feelings about their CyberFair experience. I included a picture of the white board messages on our narrative web page ( near the borrom of the page):
http://www.masters.ab.ca/bdyck/CyberFair2005/narrative/
6. How did your activities and research for this CyberFair Project support standards, required coursework and curriculum standards?
To answer these questions, we created a web page to house the following project content information. I have also linked it to our project web site.
Alberta Content Standards Addressed:
Language Arts:
http://www.masters.ab.ca/bdyck/CyberFair2005/Standards/
Information and Communication Technology Standards
http://www.masters.ab.ca/bdyck/CyberFair2005/Standards/Two/
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