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1. Description of Our Community
We live in Radauti, a small town (around 30, 000 inhabitants) in the county of Suceava, Bukovina, in Northern Romania. The ethnic composition is made of Romanians, Hungarians, Rroma, Germans and Jews. Our community is one of the oldest settlements in Moldavia, known since the 15th century. The mention of “Radomir’s village” in a 1392 document is generally believed to be the town’s first mention, and indication of the origin of the name “Radauti” The oldest mention of Radauti as such dates from 1413, in a document issued by Prince Alexandru cel Bun. Awarded the privilege of organizing fairs, Radauti evolved due to its favorable location midway between the Carpathians and the tableland area (with traders from both regions establishing contact in the local market). The fairs at Radauti have been dated to the time of Stephen the Great. An important part of our community is the “Arcanul” festival, organized each summer, in which traditional folk dancers from countries like Cyprus, Hungary, Italy, Georgia and others compete for the first prize, and march through the town centre, much to the delight of the locals. Radauti also has many cultural and historical monuments, such as: The Ethnographic Museum, The Art Galleries, the Bogdana Monastery and the Jewish Temple. At present, the mayor of Radauti is Mr. Mihai Frunza, who has been elected mayor more than three times. In 2007, our country has become a member of the European Union, and this has had a great impact upon our community, regarding the local traditional values and their promotion to the rest of the world.
2. Summary of Our Project
Our project presents the Ethnographic Museum of Radauti, one of the most important cultural values of our community. When our Romanian language teacher, Mrs. Sehlanec Angela, presented us with the possibility of entering the Cyber Fair competition, we saw it as a great opportunity of promoting our traditional folk culture, especially because nobody before us had done it, and we thought it was about time somebody did! With Romania’s entrance in the European Community, it was also a great chance to present our local values to the rest of the world. Eight students and two teachers were involved in this project, and everybody gained experience and learned many interesting things concerning our ancestors and their life as it was hundreds of years ago. The museum’s staff members showed great interest in cooperating with us and helped us gather the information we needed; they were extremely happy to see that finally, their work would be recognized on a national or better, an international scale. Our project focuses mainly on promoting our traditional culture and sharing it with the rest of the world, for nothing can be more inspiring than building our future through the past!
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:4-6
E. Additional comments concerning your computer and/or Internet access (Optional):
Our school's classrooms are not equipped with computers, and thus we couldn't access the internet in the classroom. However, our school has three informatics labs , where we had access to the internet and could conduct our research and build our project.
4. Problems We Had To Overcome
The greatest problem we had to overcome was …time! We started the greatest part of our project in February and were afraid we wouldn’t finish it on time, as we had only a couple of months to get everything ready. So, this meant we had to work very hard and cooperate with one another, share responsibilities and handle with the time pressure and deadline. At some points, the lack of proper equipment was a problem, but we solved it by borrowing what we needed from our colleagues (digital cameras, recorders). When we got involved in this project, we were aware of the fact that a great amount of work would involve computer and web designing skills, and since this is not included in our school curricula, we thought we would have a hard time finding someone to help us with the site’s design. Fortunately, one of our colleagues’(Tudor) hobbies is web designing, so his skills came in handy, not to mention the help of our IT teacher, Mr. Vasile Filip. When our project was nearly finished and we were all happy and relieved that things turned out well and according to plan, an unfortunate incident got our hearts pounding: the computer where we had stored all of our information and the project itself broke down, and thus, we had to start everything from scratch, leaving us just a couple of hours to make the deadline! It was a terrible incident, but with all the experience we had gained until that moment, we finished it in no time, and things got on track again.
5. Our Project Sound Bite
The idea of creating a site for the Ethnographic Museum had existed for some years, but somehow, it slipped from the community’s main concerns and that’s why our project came at a perfect time and managed to do two things simultaneously: participate in the CyberFair contest and make a long-time dream of our community come true: promoting our traditional folk culture and sharing the work of arts of our ancestors with the rest of the world. Everybody in our town was equally enthusiastic when they heard about our project on the radio or in the local newspaper (in the weekly edition of 'Saptamanalul de Radauti' - 3rd year, no.7, page 3) and the online version (http://www.radautiziar.ro/) and we think that it has also made the authorities and other students in our town reflect on the possibility of promoting other cultural values of our community and area, for Bukovina is one of the most important cultural centers in Romania.
6. How did your activities and research for this CyberFair Project support standards, required coursework and curriculum standards?
For this project, the students involved increased their skills in almost every curricular and extra-curriculat field, such as History, Geography, Web Design, English, Photography, Photo Manipulation, or Folk Traditions. We made sure that every member of the team had to work on a specific part of the project, according to his or her experience and knowledge about the subject. We developed skills in both Romanian text editing, as well as English translation, we perfected our abilities in conducting interviews and communicating with important people in our community and we also learnt a great deal about our ancestors and the old traditions of our people. As it is our school’s main goal to develop our personality and help us discover what it is that we like and are good at, as well as giving us the opportunity of researching almost any field we are interested in, this project fit perfectly in our school’s requirements. In the course of creating our web site, we realised that using the Internet would be a more useful way of learning, but, because we couldn’t have managed in completing our project without the use of traditional methods such as books and research, we consider that the ideal way is a mix between the two.
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1) What information tools & technologies did you used to complete your CyberFair project?
We used telephones to contact and conduct interviews with the museum staff, our school’s digital camera (which, unfortunatelly, was not always available, due to the fact that we conducted most of our research after classes), as well as our own cameras. We also used scanners to scan images and pictures as well as personal laptops we carried around for an increase in mobility. The computers in our school’s computer room, were also an important part in our developing of the project, as we used them to search information on the internet. CDs and memory sticks were used for transferring the information from one computer to another, as we did a significant part of our research and work at home. Computer software programs we used include ACDSee and Adobe Photoshop to resize and eventually modify pictures, Microsoft Word for creating and editing texts, NetObjects Fusion to create our web site. As shown in our Bibliography Page, we used mainly books and booklets issued by the Museum, as resource materials. We also had access to the Museum’s archives, which was a great help to us, because we could see and understand the Museum as it was in the past, as well as the present.
2) In what ways did you act as "ambassadors" and spokespersons for your CyberFair project both on-line and in person.
As we considered our project to have a great importance for the local community, in terms of promoting a value that has never been fully appreciated, we felt it only came natural to us to inform the public of our intentions. We did this through radio, newspapers(as quoted above) and TV broadcasts and we were very fortunate to benefit of the cooperation of local media representatives. We were very impressed by the reaction of the Museum staff, as well as the manager who told us all about their struggles to find a sponsor or someone interested in creating their web page. They seemed genuinely thankful and touched by our initiative, which , in turn, gave us the necessary strength to go on, even after we had lost a major part of our previous work. As for our local community and local representatives,we were very happy to receive positive reviews and opinions about our project, leading us to believe that our idea was welcomed and appreciated.
3) What has been the impact of your project on your community?
We are convinced that our project will truly make a difference in our community, in terms of introducing both the young and the old to the exhibits, history and staff of our Museum, as well as promoting it on a national, and hopefully, international scale. The echoes of our initiative, will, hopefully, inspire students and other members of our town to take on innovative projects and start promoting even more of our local attractions. We have already noticed other colleagues of ours starting to be interested in these kind of projects, doing research and realizing the importance of their future work on the community. In fact, our project already made a lot of difference, changing the way a school project is seen by the local authorities and proving to them that students must really be taken seriously. We were very pleased to see that after we started telling people about our project, more and more doors started opening towards us and we were able to conduct our research almost like real scientists.
4) How did your project involve other members of your community as helpers and volunteers?
First of all, we thought that such an important cultural institution as the Museum should have its own web domain, and thus we tried to find people willing to help us. We requested the help of people who had previously assisted the school in other projects. We would like to use this opportunity to send our grateful thanks to the manager of the 'National Restaurant' in Radauti, Mrs. Cornelia Dumitrescu, who sponsored us. She confessed to us that besides the cultural importance of our project, promoting touristic objectives in our area is also a benefit to her business. We also wish to thank Mr. Vasile Filip, who, although teaching in our school, helped us by sheer voluntary work, taking some of his spare time to aid us in our struggles regarding the web-designing part of our project. At the same time, we'd like to thank all the teachers of our class, who managed to keep an eye closed when we were just too tired to attend some of their classes, even if we did try to keep those incidents within reasonable boundaries. A big thanks goes out to our Romanian Literature teacher who guided us through the project, always making sure, however, that we did all the actual work and gained the experience we would need in future projects. And last but not least, to the Museum staff, who kindly granted us access to the Museum archive and agreed to give us their entire cooperation.
5) Discoveries, Lessons and Surprises (Optional)
The project enabled us to discover new things and develop new skills, such as: working with different software programs( NetObjects Fusion, Adobe Photoshop, Flash), improving our abilities in photographing details. It also gave us the opportunity of exercising our communication skills, through conducting an interview and discussing with the Museum staff. It came to us as a surprise to discover that working in a team wasn't as easy as we thought it would be; we had to reach an agreement regarding certain design details of our project(for example: fonts, colors, the banner, maps and photos), which led us to discovering and appreciating the art of compromise.
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View our CyberFair Project
(Project ID: 4973)
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