School: Anderson's Creek Primary School
    Warrandyte, Victoria, Australia

400 students, ages from 6 to 12 worked together to complete this CyberFair project on March 26, 2002. They have participated in CyberFair in the following year(s): 1997, 98,99,00,01,02

Classes and Teachers: Elaine Robertson Grade3/4, Jackie Newhouse 4, Linda Zanatta 4, Val Lynch 3, Paul Barnes 3, Lyn Regan 5/6, John Crabb 6, Andrea Leeder 6, Melissa Mitchell 5, Danielle Portelli 5, Di Mastores 1- 2, Di Phillips 2, Luanda Pianta 2, Alison Duck 1, Roula Kes

E-Mail contact:

Our School's Web Site: http://teachit.acreekps.vic.edu.au/

1. Description of Our Community

Warrandyte is our local community, which has a small township of 12,000 people living around the Yarra River on the north eastern outskirts of Melbourne. Originally settled as a pastoral district, the population grew when gold was discovered in the 1850's. Warrandyte is a suburb of the city of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Because of the town's history and relative isolation from the suburbs of Melbourne, the people of Warrandyte are a very 'close' community. Our Community is also our wider community of Melbourne, Victoria and Australia. It consists of many inspirational leaders, lots of different people and groups that give us information, help us and give us guidance, take us on tours and help us to look after our natural surroundings. Our Community is our native animals, State Parks, Rivers, mountains and many special features and attractions. In our Community we have wonderful festivals and celebrations, particularly the Warrandyte Festival. We all take part in these, especially the street parades and the

2. Summary of Our Project

Grades 1-6 have been studying our community for their integrated topics, this term, which is part of the Study of Society and Environment Curriculum. Groups of students from each class have gathered information about natural or man made attractions and features of our local or wider community. The Grade 1 and 2 classes focused on the local community of Warrandyte, which includes the beautiful Yarra River, lovely State Parks with natural bush land and many native animals. The classes visited the different places where they took photos and recorded video with digital cameras, they interviewed and emailed many people. The Grade 3's focused on Natural and Man Made attractions and features of Melbourne and Victoria. The Grade 4 classes focused on Natural and Man Made attractions and features of our wider community of Australia. Grades 5 and 6 were studying our three levels of Government. They visited the buildings of our Local, State and Federal Governments. The Grade 6 children went to our nation's capital, Canberra, for their school camp. They visited Parliament House and many other community buildings in Canberra. To add to their information they emailed many government people, used the Internet, pamphlets and many books. The Grade 5 students visited our State Parliament building and the Electoral Office and City of Manningham local council chambers. Our State and Federal Members of Parliament and a local councilor visited and spoke to us about their jobs and how they helped the community. The students produced a web project with scanned graphics and photos. We added some great videos to some of our web pages, both digital and Real Media videos. We also focused on report writing in English and writing speeches for our CyberFair Launch. We also increased our research skills using books, the internet and CDRoms.

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:2-3

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):

We have 3 computer laboratories with 16 IBM Pentium Computers and data projectors to share skills and completed projects. In all the classrooms we have mini computer labs. All computers in the school are networked to the Internet and Intranet. Every classroom has their own Internet address and Email is sent and received regularly from around the world. We have an ISDN link to the Internet.

4. Problems We Had To Overcome

We found that the time line for Australian schools was easier this year as we had more time to complete our work, which was due at the end of our first term. We were able to use the project as the final presentation of our Term One topics.

However the Grade 6's went to Canberra, ACT in mid March and so had a shorter timeline to complete their part of the project.

5. Our Project Sound Bite

It was a great project, which involved such a huge number of Grades. Everyone in the school both teachers and children

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

This project was integrated into Studies of Society and the Environment, where we were developing an understanding of our Local and Wider Community. The Grade One and Two Integrated topic was What Makes Warrandyte Special and stressed the joy our local environment gives us and how we all need to care for it. It was great to include a page on the Warrandyte Festival where our whole school is part of the main procession. The Grade 3 and 4 were studying Wonderful Australia. We learnt more about Australia and its features and attractions and where many wonderful features are located around Australia. Many children visited their feature. Grade 5 and 6 were studying our levels of government. The children participated in role-plays in Parliament, the Electoral Office and local council chambers. They investigated the voting system and ran elections for Junior School Council and began to recognize their responsibilities in a democratic society. Students were able to develop their research, reading, writing and note-taking skills while acquiring new ICT skills particularly in the use of Flash and Adobe Photoshop and Image Ready. Team work played an important part of the project; working with partners or within groups but also working on a whole school project where we considered the needs of different groups for computer use and shared information which was more suited to another group's web page. It also gave us an excellent insight into sharing information around the World Wide Web and how to develop a Web page and send Email, which is a part of Information Technology. We learnt how to scan graphics in Photo Impact and then sharpen and compress them. In English we focused on researching skills, writing reports and speeches and in Maths we did lots of work about maps.

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

We used telephones to conduct interviews, tape recorders to record sound, video cameras to make videos and scanners to scan images. We used our digital camera, which made it easier to compress images without having to scan first, and also we started to make short videos on our Sony Mavica digital camera. You can see some of these on the Warrandyte Attractions pages. Computer software programs included FrontPage, to publish our web pages, Photo Impact to scan and make modifications to our graphics and compress and resize graphics. We became expert scanners and compressors of images. Photo Impact is a great program to do this. We used Adobe Photoshop and Image Ready to make the headings and loop images and we used Flash 4 to make animations. You can see some of these on the Warrandyte State Park Page, The Clunes Goldfields, Jenolan Caves and Captain Cook's Cottage, just to mention a few. We found information in libraries, museums, books, CD-ROMs, which included Encarta, and pamphlets. Many Internet Web Sites were used to research information. You can view all the sites in the Bibliography.

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

We contacted many people in our community when we were researching for information. Many children visited the important places, museums, galleries and studios. The Grade 1 and 2 went on excursions to visit their sites. Children spoke to many people on their travels about what they were doing about a particular feature. Grade 6 visited Canberra and Grades 5 State Parliament and the Electoral Office in Melbourne and our local council chambers for the City of Manningham. Students conducted themselves appropriately within

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

This project has helped to unite our school with us all contributing our own part to the web site. The junior classes have worked on class pages and have felt very important to be part of something that the older children are involved in. It has also increased the awareness of how we can use our Intranet to publish our work electronically to share with others. This project has made a big impact on our community, because we are the only school in our area to make a Web page about Natural and Man Made Features of our Local and Wider Community. To have our Project on the WWW, will make people in our community very proud of us, because we have shown people around the world, what our community offers to everyone. People will learn about Warandyte, our state of Victoria and our capital city of Canberra and what they offer and provide our society. We think that through articles in the local newspapers, people will be very interested to view our Web page and discover our community and be able to read the wealth of information that this project contains. This project has done wonderful things to show what school children are able to do and how we have people within our local community who can help us in achieving such a great project. Newspaper reports are a great way for us to be ambassadors. Some of our teachers will speak about this project at local and international conferences, which we hope will inspire other schools to take this opportunity for themselves. It will give other teachers ideas about how to include the CyberFair into their curriculum. Many schools not only around Victoria, but also around Australia and the World will be interested to look at our project.

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

The International CyberFair entry involved many people in our community sharing their knowledge and expertise. Doug Robb, one of our children's father, assisted us with some of the more detailed graphics and with Java scripting for our navigation tools on each page. Another parent made us aware of an excellent software program Copernic, which enabled children to search on the internet successfully and find excellent sites. In their own time many parents took children to the subject of their investigation to acquire information and to take video or photos. Volunteers gave up their time to speak to groups. Some of these included, the guides at Parliament House, many of our parents accompanied us on excursions to visit museums, eg. Scienceworks, buildings eg. The Arts Centre and other features of our community eg. Puffing Billy. We also had lots of our parents help our teachers in the classroom. The visits of Phil Honeywood and Kevin Andrew, our representatives in State and Federal Government, were very much appreciated. Our visit to the local council chambers included the children being allowed to use the council chambers and wear the mayoral robes while they participated in a

5) Discoveries, Lessons and Surprises (Optional)

We thought all the videos were fantastic and we really enjoyed capturing these, making them MPEG and then compressing them into a Real Player format. You see these videos on lots of our web pages, some of which include The Melbourne Cricket Ground, The Imax Theatre, Melbourne on our Home Page, The CFA, the fire station on the Warrandyte Attractions Page, the Museum and the First Exhibition Building. The children also liked making quick movies with the digital camera when we visited our wonderful attractions. These can be seen on many of our Warrandyte Attractions projects. The children had a great time learning how to make animations and loop photos in Adobe Photo Shop and Flash 4. This was really fun. The students also enjoyed using hyperlinks so that pages could be viewed more easily. At the end of the project the really good part was looking at everyone else's fantastic pages of the project and learning lots more about our Community attractions. We would now like to visit some of our wonderful attractions of our immediate and wider community.