School: Cagdas Egitim College
    Izmir, Ege, Turkey

3 students, ages 17,17,15 worked together to complete this CyberFair project on March 14, 2007. They have participated in CyberFair in the following year(s): N/A

Classes and Teachers: Naim Nalbant, Cenk Sunar/Mert C. Ismail A. Aysegul A.

E-Mail contact:

Our School's Web Site: http://www.cagdasegitim.com.tr/

1. Description of Our Team

Our team is composed of three students; Ismail (17); I love my English class. I am excited that I’m in this project. I always have interest in American way of life. So I keep up with the project and I regard this chance uniqe for me to communicate more in English. I’m very happy. We have a publishing agency and I plan to continue with that profession as soon as I finished my education. Aysegül (15); I’m 15 and am fond of animals. I also have interest in playing football and volleyball, watching cartoons and playing computer games. I love English and I try to express my feelings in English. I want to be a doctor in military. This has been my objective since my childhood. My parents appreciated much when they learned that I participated in this project. My biggest dream is to go to America. I often watch American films. Watching American films I frequently sighted that one day I would be in America. And Mert (17);Before I do not much like English as I’m required to go along with official curriculum requirements. With this project I find something different that I can perish more than I do for my ordinary studies. I believe, I’m useful at this work. I learn English and in particular I improve my American English with this project. So it is very good development for me. Apart from this I had a new idea about the team work and the work discipline which is contrary to the one I used to have. It is good experience for me overall. Mert is in charge of draft studies for the narratives while Ismail is taking care of interviews and visits. Aysegül is responsible for internet search and questionnaire along with the video script for Mr. Ozal’s life-time. What makes us work together here as a team is the drive we have mostly for the fact that our families were and still are devote followers of Mr. Turgut Ozal.

2. Summary of Our Project

Do you think that is it easy to make radical changes in world?

How much can one changes his life. More radically how much one man change the life of a nation under his reign. We think that it would be useful to present this kind of leader to world and suddenly just one name came to our minds ”Turgut Ozal” and we settled for work.Ismail(17), Mert (17) and Aysegul(15) started to make all the necessary research. We then started to construct the outline of our project, I myself Mert(17) had already started to build our web site in my mind.

The idea that was brought up at our first meeting is to consult people with different profession and social status to recall Ozal and explore his leadership. It would be a chance for us to start with interviews so that we would be aware of areas to be stressed. Once we understood where to stress we had a clear idea about the subtitles of our web page. What makes us compete on Leadership Category is our feeling that Turkey still adores Ozal and we feel we owe much to Ozal and do take some action to compensate for.

We singled out his charismatic personality on his implementations and on his daily life avoiding detailed academic information. We believe young at our age, look for something novel, and interesting. Since our utmost aim is to lure young into world matters and diplomacy we thought we would attract some of our peers into deeds of a leader like Mr. Ozal has made and give them extra stimulus in time before they choose a life style for good.

Therefore we concentrated much about his achievements and their immediate effects upon Turkish people stressing his characteristics that would fit for a world leader. Throughout the project we paid attention to be clear on Ozal’s implementations as well as his peculiar life style.

3. Our Computer and Internet Access

A. Percentage of students using the Internet at home:less than 20

B. Number of workstations with Internet access in the classroom:none

C. Connection speed used in the classroom:dedicated connection

D. Number of years our classroom has been connected to the Internet:1

E. Additional comments concerning your computer and/or Internet access (Optional):

A- Percentage of students using the internet at home: %15

B- Number of workstations with internet access in the classroom:1 (not in the classroom)

C- Connection speed used in the classroom ADSL modem (not in the classroom)

D- Number of years our classroom has been connected to the internet:4 years

E- Additional comments concerning your computer and/or internet Access (optional)

Our school has only one room to use as a working station with internet access and with all other related equipments. Our computer lab has 20 computers with internet access but the room is not equipped to function as working station. We do not have computers in classrooms. Every student gets two hours of lab class weekly in primary and only one hour for high school.

4. Problems We Had To Overcome

As it was our first such project work. We could not find much time to allocate for our project on school days. We have very strict curriculum and it is almost impossible to continue our project works daytimes. Transportation is the other major problem we faced. Our school is located close to downtown Izmir where ironically traffic is heavy and the roads are insufficient. Only the public buses having scheduled trips once at an hour are available to reach our school. This naturally cause time loss and unfortunately lessen our actual work hours. We have done our works with many intervals and at every chance that arises. We hope our administrative stuff at school see how much we struggle on off-curriculum activities at least for our future studies. We are lucky though we have seen some signs that our studies are regarded seriously and given better credit as our project is coming to the end. We were glad to have extra stimuli when we saw our principle and even our general director paid us a visit several times in a week.

Working in front of computers kept us enough at school and we were soon pressed for time when it came to tour inside the city for our questionnaire. The trips to Ankara and to Istanbul both at 10 hours drive by bus. Due to the strict appointment list of the dignitaries we failed to combine interviews in Istanbul and had to make two trips at two weeks interval.

5. Our Project Sound Bite

As we started to interact with dignitaries and representatives of several clubs we started to get phone calls asking information on the nature of respective talks. National and local press got involved quickly and our studies appeared in press thus causing more phone calls. Our project room almost became Mr. Naim’s answering service, some of them were very curious and would like to see the complete project instantly. In fact we had to arrange a “symposium” for our parents to explain the ongoing Works and invited them comment on the project. Parents were eager to support us every way they can. They played an important role for our appearance on local and national media.

Finally a campaign was started at school to send e-mails to the people we know of and living abroad to visit our web page.

6. How did your activities and research for this CyberFair Project support standards, required coursework and curriculum standards?

Only social science we take in our curriculum helped us much in selecting the areas to look for as we started our search. It was our first experience as a project work and we all enjoyed the chance to see our ability in handling works required. Much brain storming were done continuously as we become more specific on the areas to be studied. We paid utmost attention not to deviate from our pre-set objectives exploring Mr. Ozal

Unfortunately our curriculum requirements are centered on the comprehension of textbooks and related books and everything we deal with is simply remains as a theory. Therefore the difficulty we had is to put these theories into practices.In sum, we have learnt how to plan, brainstorm, arrange, combine, check, search, cooperate and finalize a project.

1) What information tools & technologies did you used to complete your CyberFair project?

We have a project room with two internet able computers at school. Our computers work through 512 kbps internet access. We used Microsoft Front Page software while we were building our site. At first we needed to learn the properties of the software because it was like normal office word document. In this respect we received utmost support from our Computer teacher. As for the the additional softwares as Adobe Photo Shop, Macromedia Flash; we were lucky that Mert was experienced a little in this softwares anyhow, Macromedia Flash was very difficult for us at first phase. Finally when we look back we know that we owe much to our computer teacher that she thaught us many as she helped. Moreover, we also realize that this programs we learnt had added us much and will be useful in future.

2) In what ways did you act as "ambassadors" and spokespersons for your CyberFair project both on-line and in person.

What we understand from our first hand daily experience under the process of initial project work is that generally there is no consensus on how to identify Turkish citizenship toward world politics and modernization. It seems that Turkish public lost it’s energy essential for integrity with world politics as a whole. We at least three students a long with our classmates adore the days of Mr. Ozal who has an open mind to world politics and enable his people to have interest in the world politics. When our couch Mr. Nalbant mentioned “Doors to Diplomacy” Competition we delighted for the opportunity solely for the chance that we would undertake the role of liaison to students of our age and could incite them doing similar works. Immediately upon our involvement into our project, much to our surprise we have appeared on Turkish press with striking headlines and started to get real nice credits from our teachers as well as our parents at home.

3) What has been the impact of your project on your community?

Most of the time things appear to be straight. This is particularly true to the societies in which people are kept busy with bureaucracy and the paperwork. People think that they live the life fully but in fact they do maintain their status. Truth is the monotony sensed in every phase of our life. What we are indulged is typical act to break that cycle of monotony. To remind Turkish citizens of Mr. Ozal’s achievements thus giving them a chance to judge present time more accurately. We created a spark to ignite the spirit especially in young to percieve life positively and set more rational objectives for their individual growth and for the welfare of their country. The significant aspect of our participation into “Doors to Diplomacy” for our community means,though it may seem somehow absurd, is that we are highly welcomed by Americans and are given a further chance to work with them. The newspaper headlines which reads “Students of Cagdas College are at Whitehouse” conforms to this notion.

We are glad to live in a society which adores western way of life while fully enjoying its eastern values and traditions as embeded in one of Mr. Ozal’s sayings which reads “Turkey had always been, still was and would be a part of Europe”

4) How did your project involve other members of your community as helpers and volunteers?

Since the topic is Mr. Ozal, his old time companions who had worked for him,contacted us with zest seeking to see how we have accomplished such a project. So it really became easy for us to get an appointment with them for our planned interviews.

Parents were first to get interested in our project. They, in turn, turned out to be our “ambassadors” to affect people in neighborhoods complementing our initiation with some advices on the content of the project.