1. Description of Our Community
The original name of Daya Shiang in Taichung County is “Dam.” It is located in the northern Taichung Basin and the eastern Da-du tableland. The famous CCK Military Airport is sited on Chingchuangang to commemorate General Chen Ching-chuan. The U.S.A. had garrisoned here, so the residents were greatly influenced by Western culture of optimism and friendliness. With the development of woodworking industry, the shoes-making and the woodcraft industries were once prosperous and internationally well-known in the past. However, both industries have degenerated, in recent years, because of the industry transfer. Now the government is promoting the delicate agriculture to upgrade its quality of Flower and Vegetable. The product quantity of flower is up to the second place in our country now.
2. Summary of Our Project
Huei-Ming Private School is founded as a special education and nursery school of blind children with Christian spirit. In the past half century, they have devoted themselves to taking care of the weak visually impaired children and even the multiple disabled ones to realize their educational belief of love and acceptance: the children can grow up with dignity and regain their innocence.
At beginning, they only had thirteen students and four teachers, but now the amount is up to 230 students and 140 teachers. During the past five decades, they have always followed their founding object of the school, attempting to provide the best learning environment for the visually impaired, the multiple disabled and the mental handicapped children without any tuition and discrimination. Though they face the problem of fund deficiency, their confidence and perseverance have never been worn out until now.
Since the government cannot offer enough support for taking caring of minority groups, Huei-Ming certainly plays an important role in the society. It is its nobleness that we feel deeply touched and respected; therefore, we truly appreciate the devotion of the 140 teachers and staffs, and applaud for the brave visually impaired children.
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):
Our school is connected to the Taichung area Internet hub – National Chung Hsing University – via a bi-directional fiber optics line, then connected to the TAnet. We also rent four ADSL lines and one cable as back-up lines. All these Internet connections are fed into a load balancer so that different ISP’s could be sorted out. The parents and students use mostly 2M/256K ADSL lines by Hinet at home.
4. Problems We Had To Overcome
(a) Information shortage - Before working on this project, the group members knew nothing about the visually impaired children. Fortunately, by surfing the internet and looking for the information, we obtained a lot of helpful and valuable materials for us to carry on this project, especially Ko Yen-chi ’s book, The Visually Impaired Fighter, which sharing Ko’s experiences in dedicating herself to special education.
(b) Thousands of strands and loose ends - Since each group member had his own specialty, we first worked on the project individually and made the integration in the end. Also, the teachers’ assistance in this project promoted our cooperation and led a beneficial result.
(c) Lack of skills - We all lacked the computer skills, especially the ability of web page design. Thank to the patient instruction of Mr. Lu, we finally accomplished the work.
(d) Discrepancy - It is usual that each member may have his own opinions in a group, so there is no exception in our group. And we often worked individually, so it was inevitable that each of us would insist our own ideas. By discussion and communication, or even vote, we tried to make the final agreement.
(e) Time arrangement - The class time of Huei-Ming is as same as ours. In order to give consideration to both understanding the learning situation of the visually impaired children and taking care of our own studies, we usually asked for leave in weekly-meeting of our school and went visiting Huei-Ming. We usually went there to record the interaction between the teachers and the students and to visit our sponsored children.
5. Our Project Sound Bite
By giving the promise of “love and care”, we definitely expect every child will become confident and find his own way to making a colorful and wonderful life.
6. How did your activities and research for this CyberFair Project support standards, required coursework and curriculum standards?
(a) Taking it as our own Responsibility - The highest level of love is showing empathy for the poor, the weak and the sick. We expected ourselves to cultivate a compassionate and sympathetic heart; then, we would see helping the weak visually impaired children as our own responsibility and involve ourselves into the meaningful activity. Besides, we appealed our friends and family to participate in this activity and work together for the same goal.
(b) Combining Education - The goal of Cyber Fair is to strengthen the connection between school and country community by empowering and uniting. Being one of the community members, we needed to combine what we had learned in school and devote ourselves to promoting our home-town affairs. We should publicize to every one that there is an organization endeavoring to look after the visually impaired children in Taichung county.
(c) Sharing Resources - We showed our project and shared our accomplishment by internet, so every one would become familiar with Huei-Ming and might contribute their kindness and love to the school. Otherwise, we agreed to share our resources with Huei-Ming, so the internet users would be able to quickly get all information about Huei-Ming on line.
(d) Mutual Development - If the visually impaired children’s light house, Huei-Ming, wants to exist perpetually, it would certainly need the contribution and the support from the society to help it become the strongest castle for these disabled children. In the age of Internet, we are willing to show our warmth and try to make some effort to continue the development of Huei-Ming by setting the Chinese and English websites for them.
|