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1. Description of Our Community
Zory is regarded as one of the oldest towns of Silesia. Its history dates from 1272. At present Zory has about 65 thousand of dwellers. The town is situated in the southern part of Silesian voivodeship, near the boarder with The Czech Republic and Slovakia as well as near attractive territories of Silesian and Zywiec Beskidy Mountains. Our school is located in the center of Zory and is the oldest school in the town. Nearby situated old cemetery and the church dedicated to St. Philip and Jacob as well as the building where we learn they all command our respect to the history of our native town. We are absorbed by contemporary problems: we learn how to use computers, the Internet, we take an active part in the School European Club, we publish the school newspaper, we take part in many contests...
2. Summary of Our Project
Since the very beginning of the school existence we have been oriented at the artistic development of the students. A great majority of us attend music schools, dance groups, choirs, and takes part in various artistic events in Zory. The main aim of this project was to present local community seen from the angle of students own experience who have just begun their adventure with art. The students present local masters and interview them. We decided to show that not so big town as Zory is also vibrant with artistic life. Music, dance, painting and other artistic forms are all familiar to us. The artists from local artistic society are regular guests in our grammar school. We present them all in our project but at the same time we do not forget about the young artists who have already begun their learning a trade. The project 'Zory - our wonderful artistic fatherland' focused on the multimedia in a form of films as well as the direct communication in a form of interviews conducted by the students. The Portal made by students is the first web page of this type, which has been created in our town. It is actualized all the time. We present the most famous groups in Poland for instance Carrantuohill, but we do not forget about local folk groups 'Zory', 'Osinianki', the Polish dance champions 'Mazoretki'. Thanks to the immediate vicinity of Jazz and Light Music Department of Music Academy in Katowice a lot of artists from Zory centered around jazz and light music. Lothar Dziwoki and his Zory's Light Orchestra and Grzegorz Karnas are also connected with this Music Academy.We try to use mainly own multimedia sources in our work. As far as other authors are concerned, we were given a permission to place their materials on the project website.
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
E. Additional comments concerning your computer and/or Internet access (Optional):
Apart from the computer room the computers are also in other classrooms. Moreover, the school makes use of two laptops. All computers are on line and has permanent access to the Internet. Grammar School in Zory was awarded twice with Interklasa Quality Mark.
4. Problems We Had To Overcome
The main problem was the fact that the school found about the Cyberfair project too late and that it took part in it for the first time. At that time other projects were being carried out, including international projects. We had to plan appropriately all activities, especially the meetings at school with famous artists from Zory. The problem of different category is the fact that the Cyberfair website is created in English language. All texts included on the website were checked by four English teachers. At the beginning of the project realization the school was also obliged to buy a digital camcorder. It was also quite difficult to organize some of the meetings with artists who for instance, were on concert tours while we were doing the project.
5. Our Project Sound Bite
'The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence' The main aim of the project was to engage as many students as possible who could take part in it during art, music, computer science and English lessons as well as extra computer science and art classes. The important goal of this project was to focus students' attention on local artistic forms, events and make them aware of the fact that Zory is also a place for young artists creating their works. The additional benefit of doing the project concerns the use of information technology during conducting interviews and providing documentation of school and town events as well as developing skills relating to creating multimedia presentations and websites.
6. How did your activities and research for this CyberFair Project support standards, required coursework and curriculum standards?
The project 'Zory - our wonderful artistic fatherland' corresponds greatly with the computer science, art and music standard requirements. We chose the category ' Local music and artistic forms' of Cyberfair competition because we cared mostly about presenting the local artistic community in a form of a website. We wanted to engage the entire school community in gathering documentation and preserving local culture. There is no such website in our town and this is also the reason why we chose this category. We didn't want our students' work to be imitative nor originating entirely from outside sources of information. A great majority of aspects presented on the website is the result of the students' creativity, interviews, artists' visits in our school. Unfortunately, artistic events are poorly described and systematized in the Internet. It was our main task to carry out; that is to present and popularize all these aspects in a one place in the net. Information technologies were used mainly in the scope of optimization and graphic and multimedia files edition e.g. in our project we included many films. The students created multimedia presentations concerned with local music, painting, events etc. as a part of computer science and extra lessons conducted in a form of project. The students are divided into three groups: the reporters, technicians and webmasters as well as translators as a part of interdisciplinary project classes. The reporters used the Internet to search for information, the technicians were responsible for exchanging the files by FTP and testing the website. The smaller, mixed groups within one class were also created. At the same time a group of students during the art classes were occupied with organizing meetings with famous artists and discussed issues concerning music and artistic styles. The last and equally important task was carried out by the students who translated texts as a part of English lessons. The last work was done by the webmasters and the students who dealt with edition of HTML and PHP languages and the students who created simple animations in Flash technology. This is the way our website was created. We warmly invite you to visit it!
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