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1. Description of Our Community
Our project’s local community includes: the students and teachers of our school (approx. 800 people), candidates to school, graduates, our students’ parents and relatives, workers and managers of the firms we are describing in the project and workers of the firms we are going to describe in the nearest future, people whom we’ve helped to as Voluntary Servises (approx. 4000 people). We are planning to develop our project to help our students decide about their future and job. So, our “local community” is a group dynamically changing every year.
2. Summary of Our Project
This web site was created from the very beginning by the students who used PHP, MySQL and Flash to prepare it. The project competition 'Choose Life' was mainly realized for our students, basing on our own poll made by students. We are addressing it to their parents to candidates to school and for our local community. It informs them about successful firms from Wroclaw – a large city (650 000 people) in the South-West of Poland.
We prepared two presentations about our beautiful and interesting city for candidates living in the towns near Wroclaw, as well as for people visiting our web site. The sources of information were the firms, web-sites, books and dictionaries. The students have collected data, described it and discussed on the project pages. The work on the project took a few months resulting in friendly meetings, talks and events.
At the end of the work we feel satisfied of the well done job. It is a great experience for young people to continue such a wide task. More and more people are interested in it and there are students who want to continue the work during the next school year. Each of the described firms has its own sub-page where you can find the history achievements, an interview with a worker, photos (taken by the authors of the sub-page) and expectations from candidates. But there is another point of view – work and devote to the poor people, as a way of life. We’ve described our Voluntary Services at School works. We interviewed them to see how they organize their actions.
The authors gave their opinion of possibilities of being employed. The editors have worked out the introduction of the project: 'Is it worth learning...?' and formulated and conducted a survey among students of the fourth year examining the future students' and workers' opinions. The interesting results and conclusions are supported by diagrams. Anna Wrona has collected her observations and opinions in the article 'Work'. All the work has been completed in the last month. The project idea is very important for the country where the market economy rules have been functioning for quite a short time and problems and setbacks influence students' pessimistic assessment of their own situation and chances.
The students want to know the truth, they are eager to work on the project and that is why we can't say 'the end' today (19 March), we say ' this is the beginning'. And when is the end?
3. Our Computer and Internet Access
A. Percentage of students using the Internet at home:21-50%
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:4-6
E. Additional comments concerning your computer and/or Internet access (Optional):
We have at school computers PC Pentium III, Pentium IV, equipped in HDD 40 GB, RAM 128 MB, colour screen CRT 15'. In a computer room we have scanner, an ink printer HP 920, CD-RW recorder
4. Problems We Had To Overcome
The main obstacle is the lack of time. Students are at school from 8a.m. to 2.30 p.m. After dinner they do their homework and they study for the next day. The project is based on teamwork so there were problems to find some free time and get together. Several times the Web designer Michal happened to fall asleep by the computer because he was so tired but, as he says never on the keyboard. He likes watching Tokyo cam-on-line to relax. The students working on the project chose a list of the firms they found interesting but some firms didn't want to talk and one (JTT) went bankrupt. No one agreed to authorize the interview; we think they are concerned about losing of their job.
5. Our Project Sound Bite
Our project 'Choose Life' provoked asking and looking for answers to the questions: - Is learning important? - Am I thinking about my future? - What would I like to do? - Who am I going to be? - Do I really know my home city well? - How can I prepare to the future challenges? Thinking about these questions many hours and finding answers, contributed to their social and individual development. Students notice how important the problem is when they start asking adults. They try to answer the questions individually which is not easy. They learn how to sort out information, analyse it and prepare for publication. The art of translation requires good knowledge of English. So if they want to be journalists they must work hard on their qualities and skills. On the other hand, firms benefit from contacts with the school because they get free advertisement. Thanks to the presentation on the school page students and parents can get some information about their achievements.
6. How did your activities and research for this CyberFair Project support standards, required coursework and curriculum standards?
The project 'Choose Life' fulfills the requirements of the category no 3 'Business and organizations'. Making the project is more than the obligatory IT and English syllabus. The group of students who decided to work on the project faced more difficult demands. They wanted to do it as well as they could-on the highest level so it developed their abilities in the area of page designing, English translation of the text, contacting the companies, formulating questions for surveys and interviews.
They learn to rely one on another in the different tasks, without instructions from the teacher. They learn to team work, one of them organized progress in actions as project’s manager Data analysis during the work on the project enabled to state that the traditional teaching methods, graduate from University or Economy Academy gives chances for the satisfaction at work. The modern company cannot function without the contact with the world via Internet. Internet is a very important tool in education because enables students to get the information in a short time, motivating them to bigger efforts. This CyberFair project is a great work, design, research and data analysis took much longer than we expected but the whole team worked hard to close it in term.
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