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1. Description of Our Team
‘Doors to Diplomacy’ was introduced to our team by Abdullah, who is a member in the team. He was surfing the net when he found the doors to diplomacy website, and immediately presented the project idea to the school principle who agreed. Mr. Stephen was chosen to be our coach, who welcomed the idea and gave us his full support. Morad and Ahmed were chosen to join the team, and they spontaneously agreed. We wanted to join a fourth person to our team, so we thought about a student who agreed at the beginning but had to leave the team due to personal reasons. We thought of joining a person out of the country, so we can get more information from different sources. So we joined to our team Haitham who is currently on a scholarship in the USA studying final grade. We communicate with him using the messenger and e-mail. In brief, our team is made up of Abdullah T. (16 Years) the quintessential leader and our website designer. The project wouldn’t have been completed without him. Morad S. (17 Years) the team inspirational, he was the source of most of the information, and took the responsibility in completing the part about Diplomacy in our project. Ahmed M. (17 Years). He took the biggest responsibility in completing the project part about are country Yemen. Haitham D. (17 Years), the smart member. Although he joined the team late, he had a very big contribution in the project. He supported us with his ideas, comments and advice. We are the first team representing our country in a project like this, and we all share an objective of changing our community to be better. We shared while doing this project many memories of fun and excitement, and we will always be a team.
2. Summary of Our Project
As students, we always have to do the same routine everyday, do homework, and study for exams. But this project made us see a path to break this boring routine and learn new things in an exciting way. But our objective was not narrow; we wanted to include our community to join us learning new things. And that is what made us choose the category of ‘History of Foreign Relations’. Foreign Relations has been the issue mostly discussed in our recent time. We needed to raise the people awareness about the great affect of these relations on people themselves, and at the same time increase their general knowledge. Our project divides into three main parts, with each part supporting the other. In the first part which is ‘Diplomacy’, it discusses the theory of diplomacy and foreign relations. Here we explain how foreign relations supported and how it is affected. We also discuss separately about wars and their causes. We gave supporting stories about kids suffering in wars in order to enhance the bad picture of wars. In the second part, Yemen, we consider it as an analysis to the foreign policy of a country. We have chosen our country Yemen to raise our local community awareness. We discussed about significant diplomatic milestones in our country such as the borders conflict with neighboring countries and how did the country handle these conflicts. In the third part, World Events, we discussed some current conflicts that are happening around the world in order to increase the visitor awareness about what is happening in the world and their reasons. We also have a special test called “Young Leaders” which gives foreign relations situations and asks from the visitor to imagine he is a leader of an imaginary country and asks him to use his critical thinking to solve these situations. By all of these we certainly achieved the category learning objectives and exceeded them, to give a comprehensive educational site that we hope will interest our audience.
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:dial-up modem
D. Number of years our classroom has been connected to the Internet:2-3
4. Problems We Had To Overcome
We faced many problems during our work, but we successfully overcome them. Our main problem was scheduling our time. Our project was completely extracurricular, and we had to give a lot of time to our primary activities. Mid-term School exams took from us over a whole month, sports events that required from us practice, religious activities, family affairs, and winter diseases that slowed our work. Each time we face a problem, we had to do an extra effort to save some time. We also faced some problems trying to arrange our time with some community members that willed to give us help. To solve this, we had to let our timetable so flexible by ending our school homework and primary activities early. We sorted our work between us so that everyone can research and write articles on it, so that in case anyone faces a problem, the whole team work won’t be affected and slowed to a large extent. One of the problems we have is that one of our team members is in the USA, and communication between us has been slow. To solve this we decided regular times where we can meet on the net and we also made our e-mail communication a daily basis. From the technical side, website designing has been difficult but we managed easily to overcome these difficulties.
5. Our Project Sound Bite
“Diplomacy is the powerful tool to make the foreign relations happen”. This was our topic for the project as well as what we try to show through our work. In our project we try to show that diplomacy is the key to foreign relations; and foreign relations are the key to peace and the exchange of benefits. This is what our community involving our teachers and our friends approved on. Through our project we are sending a clear message to people, proving the effect of diplomacy on our lives. In the first page of the site we made a small flash movie which sends a message through pictures. We gave pictures of children crying and pictures of wars to reach the emotions of the visitor and we gave text messages to enhance the idea, then we gave pictures of shaking hands which means the countries are building foreign relations and finally we gave pictures of happy kids to show that happiness is the result of what we get from good relations but not wars.
6. How did your activities and research for this CyberFair Project support standards, required coursework and curriculum standards?
This project was totally extracurricular and voluntary. We reflected our objective through the way we wrote our text. We cared about putting rhetoric questions between the paragraphs which aim to interact with the reader and keep him concentrated with the ideas. This project supports our curriculum in English language, where we applied our writing rules on our articles and wrote them in a coherent manner to benefit the reader. It also supported in social studies, where we went through our history of our country and we made a small interactive quiz “Young Leaders” to enjoy the readers. Our text and articles are designed for different comprehension levels. We made with each article some pictures and graphics to enhance the attention of the reader. We also added external links to give the chance for the reader to follow his subject interests. We believe that using the internet is a very effective way to send the ideas and present them in an interesting manner, so in order to create more interactions in the website we created forums to our website to invite the visitor to comment, ask, and interact with the community online. We also made the first page of the website contains a flash movie which sends a message through pictures. During our research, we used to meet after making an agenda, practicing similarly as if we had a business company, but this agenda made us realize the importance of our meetings, and let us know what do we expect in the meeting to happen and do we gain from that meeting. This helped us to realize the importance of scheduling and organizing. We worked relentlessly to ensure that we benefit our audience and community with what we have done, and at the same time to ensure that we learn from everything we do.
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1) What information tools & technologies did you used to complete your CyberFair project?
We live in an age of technology that made our work much easier. We used the e-mail, live chat and the telephone to keep in contact even in holidays. Each of us had a personal computer, with the latest software, which we greatly used in researching from the internet or from the Encarta Encyclopedia 2005. Easy computer software helped us designing a nice website. We used flash movie software, PowerPoint presentations to enhance our web. Libraries were a big source of information for us. We kept buying the daily newspapers in case we fine an article in our field of interest. Newspapers which helped us were like our local newspapers “Yemen Times” and “Al-Thawra”. We made some interviews with people, about topics that we researched on. We also used forums in our website that are useful to make the community involved even online. When we advertised for our website project, we used smart boards that we hanged on the school walls. We also printed posters and small business cards and handed them over to a lot of people in our community. To also inform people in the international community about our website, we sent e-mails to many large e-mail groups. We are also going to make a small advertisement in a local wide-spreading newspaper, presenting our main idea and the website address. Above all, the greatest help to us in our project has been the people and our teachers who assisted us and made our mission easy.
2) In what ways did you act as "ambassadors" and spokespersons for your CyberFair project both on-line and in person.
As students doing a project like this for the first time in our country, our main objective is to make the right impression of what we want to present for the sake of raising the awareness about foreign relations. We opened a discussion in our class speaking about diplomacy and foreign policies. We also presented to them our small interactive quiz “Young Leaders”, which excited all of us. After we gave some light to our ideas, we advised them to visit the website and also join our forums, where we can continue our discussions online and with a lot of more people. We plan to make another lecture at the beginning of April for different students other than our class. From the things we hope will make the visitor more eager to continue in all the website, is the small flash movie we made at the first page in our website that will help to change the visitor feelings. We also made a special guest book in our website to allow each visitor to comment on the website, and share with us what he have learned. Many of our teachers were interested in helping us, even more when we explained about our main objective which is raising awareness about the importance of diplomacy in foreign relations. Some commented this project as a noble mission because it aims to benefit the people
3) What has been the impact of your project on your community?
Our website audiences are primarily our local community and secondarily the international community. Thanks to our friend Haitham in the USA who will greatly help us to announce for our website there. The e-mail letters we will send to many people around the world are to invite them to our website. But what has been the impact on our local community? First to achieve big benefit to our local community we made a special part about our country Yemen. This part aims to inform the people about our country history, and at the same time add a new source of information to our community to make them more open-minded. At the same time, we made the part which is called “World Events” for both the local and international communities. This part aims to raise the awareness about what is happening around the world. In the part “Young Leaders”, we encouraged the audience to use critical thinking. But it didn’t stop here, we have a special category about “Young Leaders” in our forums to make the visitor continue thinking and discussing the way to solve the situations presented with other visitors, which will make it more exciting and useful. We made our text and articles contain some direct questions in between the paragraphs as if though the reader himself has been asking these questions. Visitors to our website have not only learned what diplomacy is made of, but also how to analyze diplomatic conditions. So we assured that we put at the end of most articles a paragraph which briefly lists the lessons we learn from the topic. Our greatest impact on community has been through direct conversations and lectures. We plan to extend more in giving our lectures for our site to raise more awareness about diplomacy to more people and at the same time increase our site visitors.
4) How did your project involve other members of your community as helpers and volunteers?
We live in a capital of a country which is located in the Middle East, where many diplomatic affairs and events are happening. This made our mission easier to find people who were extremely helpful to us in our project. We deeply thank and appreciate them for their time and effort. We first thank our fathers Dr. Abdusalam Al-Thawr, Mr. Khaled Sharef Al-Dein, Mr. Hassan Al-Matwakal, who were the biggest help to us and helped us locate information sources and generate ideas for the project. We also deeply thank Dr. Abdullah Al-Faqih who is a professor in political sciences in Sana’a University and also in Boston University (USA), he was a very big help to us in the ‘Yemen’ and ‘Diplomacy’ part. Dr. Abdullah was very interested to help us in every part and also to review our project. We deeply thank and appreciate Mr. Ali Lotf Al-Thawr, who was a past minister of foreign Affairs for Yemen, for his allowance to have an interview with him regarding Yemen’s diplomacy. We would like to thank also our dedicated teachers in our school who helped us outlining our project and gave us a lot of advice and guidance. Mr. Abdul-Husain (Chemistry teacher) offered us insight into the diplomacy and world events parts. Mrs. Essia Dahdouh (English teacher) offered us her valuable advice in the Yemen Part. Mr. Khaled Motahar (social supervisor) provided us with useful advice and guidance. From the students we also would like to thank Hamzah Ishaq for his special contribution to our site. Also, a great thanks to Kanar and Marwa who were the major source of useful ideas in the part of Yemen and World Events.
5) Discoveries, Lessons and Surprises (Optional)
We must admit that this project packed us up with new experiences and knowledge. We learned how valuable time is for us, and how to exploit all resources we have got. The biggest discovery we found is the amount of work we had to do in order to present a useful site to the community. We learned how to make our meetings professional by making useful meeting agendas. We learned a great amount of new information we didn’t know from before. We discovered many positive things about our country concerning diplomacy and its foreign policy which makes us proud of our country. This project made us more courage when speaking to people from community and taught us how to ask for a meeting or an interview. One of the most important things we learned was improving our writing skills and our English language. As a conclusion, we learnt that patience, dedication, high inspiration, large motivation, confidence, positive attitude are the components of a team that seeks success.
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View our CyberFair Project
(Project ID: 3851)
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