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1. Description of Our Community
The city, where those beautiful folk songs showed in this web come from, is our home town - Hengchun. Located at the southern tip of Taiwan and surrounded by sea on three sides, Henchun Peninsula is known as Taiwan's tail. On the west edge of Pacific ocean, it's about the same latitude as Havana in Cuba. Because of it's variety in special tropic terrain and landscapes, Kenting National Park is found here in 1984, to preserve these gifts from nature. It's the best classroom for studying topography and geology. More than two million tourists visit Kenting National Park every year . It's an inviting destination for travelers to come over and over again. 130 years ago, in the first year of Guangshu of Qing Dynasty(1875), Shen Baojen build a city ,Hengchun County, with wall surrounded in Langqiao.( Hengchun was known as Langqiao in old days.), to defense Qing's claims on Taiwan over the waters surrounding the island. Hengchun Ancient city is built for the sake of defense with Chinese feng shui. It is centered at Houdong Mountain and surround by four other mountains outside it's wall . Most of the people here are the descents of the early immigrants from China Mainland in 18 century. The ancestors, their hard working and struggling for living, are still recalled in the folk songs sung here. But like many other places in the modern world today, these culture treasures are fading, only the elder people over 60 years old know these well. So, this is especially meaningful for our young students to have the chance to study Hungchun folk songs in this project.
2. Summary of Our Project
The formation of Hengchun folk song came mainly from the people in the early age of Taiwan's migration history (about 18 century) who migrate across the sea from China Mainland to here. The life of farming this new land was very hard. In order to relieve, they would sang tunes made up by themselves with words about their daily life. People to people, everyone around here knew these songs finally, and the original writer could not be specified any more. There was another saying about the creation of these folk song : certain balladeer has made them, and sang around in Henchun area. But consider the inconvenient traffic then, it was most unlikely that songs could be popularized this way. The rhythm can be changed as singer wishes. And the tune varies slightly to avoid homonyms as singer needed. No matter how they were changed, Hengchun folk songs have their own style always. They talk about the life, events, scenery or the singer's feeling about these things. Hengchun folk song includes five tones : “Ox tail”,“Thinking of”,“Five Holes”,“Four Season Spring”,“Pingpu” “Farming Song”. In the past some thirty years, Taiwan has continuously promoted the folk music in all efforts. This project intends to record the process of the refinement of folk music. By way of promoting the beauty of the folk musical culture, we expect to have mutual international interaction, and further to surge the new life of innovation, continuation, exploration, and development for the folk music.
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:1
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):
There is one computer classrooms in our school, consisting of 35 computers. They connect to Our school's LAN by a 100MB backbone which is further connected with Pingtong City Education Network Center via EPON(Ethernet Passive Optical Network), and in turn, linked to Taiwan Academic Network. Apart from the computer room, computers in faculty offices can also be hooked on the internet. There are one Server, WWW Server, Proxy Server, E-Mail Server ,etc.
4. Problems We Had To Overcome
(1) It is not easy to get in touch with Mr. Jhu Ding Shun, and Mrs.Chen Ying, the famous folk song singer here. After we did, thanks to them, we were able to have more contacts with other important folk song singers and interviewed them. (2) It is difficult to arrange a schedule for all our team members besides their regular school time. (3) To dispatch task among all the members was complicated. For our theme study, the member must write many learning sheets, interview records and thoughts, the task load was impressive, so we decided to set up a “single window”. All the work was to be submitted in electronic files to Kai-Ping’s mailbox. This way, not only the issue was solved, the efficiency was also increased.
5. Our Project Sound Bite
The passion the old folk song singers show to promote the folk songs deeply impressed everyone. The treasure is in our life, around us, we should thank all of them.
6. How did your activities and research for this CyberFair Project support standards, required coursework and curriculum standards?
We put folk music into the lessons for all grades in our school. This type of activities is one of the special features of our school. The folk music match totally with the arts and humanity, musical and physical education, set forth in the twenty years in one curriculum, presently in force. During the planning of this project, we learned how to collect and organize information, courtesy and techniques for our interviews, the key points to consider during the records, and the technology of web page production and photography. All these contents also match the fields of language, variety, social studies, computer science and other fields. Taking Hengchun Primary School for example, our folk team not only performs at the school anniversary, school variety show every year, it is sometimes invited to perform in other places, to exchange culture in other communities. Also, it is given a great opportunity to present the aesthetics of folk music in front of more people.
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