1. Description of Our Team
Our Political Studies teachers introduced this project to us as a way to get us interested and internationally aware of international affairs. Little did we know that we would be so enthralled by the information we discovered. The people in our group are Amanda (age 17), Emily (age 17), Ivan (age 17), and I, Christina (age 17). In the beginning, we emerged as a group knowing each of our teammate’s potential to contribute to this project. After discussing our project and our views on diplomacy in business, economics, and trade, we found out that we had a diverse outlook within our group on this project. In addition, we decided to split up the topics into three separate categories so that we could research them more in depth. Emily created our website in addition to researching our topic of economics. Christina took on the task of researching the trading segment of our project in addition to making sure we were getting all of the required content into our website. Amanda researched the business aspect of our website in addition to collaborating with the other team members to make sure our ideas were consistent. Ivan did additional research for our website on top of the research that our other three team members did. We decided to use him to research all of our information so that we could have more content and a different outlook on the same topic. Julia Berger and Robin Stanley, as our advisors on this project guided us through the project and told us what we needed to accomplish. They helped us research topics when we didn’t know what to type in as keywords. On top of all of that, they were always there to answer our questions whenever we asked about our website or the content in our website. If they couldn’t answer it, they were able to find someone else that was.
2. Summary of Our Project
The doors to diplomacy website project focuses on eight categories that are an essential part of any nation. The categories are leadership traits, peace and democracy, science and technology, safety and security, history of foreign relations, health and environmental awareness, arts and culture, and business, economics, and trade. The first task of this project was to choose the topic of our choice, which was business, economics, and trade we then had to begin our research and collect information from many sources to assure that we had enough content. The last part of this project was to complete a website that demonstrated how our topic connects to diplomacy. Along with the content we had certain questions we had to answer for each of the three categories, some key questions were about importing and exporting goods, business objectives and maintaining a strong economic culture in the United States along with other countries. We also had certain objectives we had to meet such as demonstrating the dependence which exists within our own community and the multi-national networks that connect goods, people ideas and information. We also had to identify successful international businesses and organizations and describe the contributions those organizations make to our personal lives; we evaluated economic trends and business opportunities, as we took our chosen career path into consideration during our research.
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:not sure
D. Number of years our classroom has been connected to the Internet:more than 6
4. Problems We Had To Overcome
One of the biggest technical obstacles that our group faced was uploading our project to a web hosting page. We would upload it, and then it would delete our files and we’d have to start all over again. It was extremely frustrating considering we had so many pages and pictures to upload all at once.
5. Our Project Sound Bite
The Doors to Diplomacy project has given us an immense amount of exposure to the United States’ international affairs and foreign policy as well as countries around the world. It has changed how we view the each nation when it comes to business, economics and trade, which will be valuable to us in the future.
6. How did your activities and research for this CyberFair Project support standards, required coursework and curriculum standards?
When we first had this project presented to us, we spent a lot of our time researching the topics that we were given when we divided the work up. While we were researching we spent most of our time online (which was our main source of information). During this phase of the project we all had to use our researching skills to find out all the information that we would need to get it done. Certain topics proved harder than others to find, and it was even harder to find information about different topics that all ended up tying in together. This project tied in nicely with our standards at New Tech because it is a technology based school, it made since to have a project where we needed to make a website. In addition, it gave us practice in using the program Macromedia Dreamweaver, which we rarely get to use. Also it involves learning about the very thing we were learning in class, so this project gave us a great opportunity to learn and research topics on our own. This is the perfect type of project for our school because our school’s philosophy is trust, respect, and responsibility. This project used all of these things: trust in your partners, and your abilities. Respect for your teammates learning styles and way of doing things. And responsibility, having the sense of responsibility to do what is required of you when others are counting on you.
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