1. Description of Our Community
Our community district is: Our school resides in Yunghe City, New Taipei City. It is located near the southeast part of the Taipei Basin and is linked by three bridges over the Xindian River. Yung Ho is as prosperous as Taipei city, and it is well known for its numerous small shops and attractions such as Korean Street, Weekend Farmers' markets, Yang San Lang's Museum and the World Religions Museum.
2. Summary of Our Project
How to promote reading at the grassroots elementary school level has been one of the big debates in education courses for some time. Reading can help improve one's language ability, experience the beauty of literature, and also help students establish a perspective on life. Located in the Yonghe District, Small Small Bookstore began operations in 2006. Since then it has been doing its best to promote reading, and make reading a way of life for the community. Through a variety of workshops, book clubs and literary events the bookstore tries to promote reading within the local community. We hope that from our research on this topic, we can let people discover the joy of reading and make it a part of their life. Through interviews and getting involved in activities, we hope to discover the passion of the lovely people of Yonghe. We also hope this experience can help them rediscover their local community and what it has to offer. Finally, we hope that we can help our school and the local community discover the joy and passion that reading can bring.
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):
We utilized our school's ample computers to access the Internet: there are 50 computers in the computer lab, 4 computers in the library, each classroom also has its own computer and all of these have direct access to the Internet. Having convenient access to these resources really helped us in facilitating our projects' needs and getting work done.
4. Problems We Had To Overcome
Class time In order to complete the production of the website, we used not only our break times and lunch times, but also after school and weekends. We also came to school during our winter vacation in order to finish the project. One of the conditions of joining the team, was that it must not interfere with our regular studies. So during class time, we were extra focused and used our time wisely to get our regular work finished with enough time to complete the Cyberfair project. Work Allocation This time our activities included conducting interviews, attending events at Small Small Bookstore, and a host of other community events. At each event, we all had a number of different missions. We chose jobs to match each team members' individual talents. Each member worked hard to complete their job and help others to get the job done. Collecting Material We wanted to really understand Small Small Bookstore and related organizations so we all spent a long time searching online, at the library, and conducting interviews to find information. It took us a long time to figure out how to sort out all the data in a way that we could present as a website! Finally, we also need to thank Small Small Bookstore and all those who allowed us to interview them for the information they provided. Transcribing To ensure that the information is correct, after every interview we typed up the conversation. A short thirty minute interview ended up taking between three and five hours to transcribe! Because of this we broke up each interview into small pieces and shared out the workload.
5. Our Project Sound Bite
6. How did your activities and research for this CyberFair Project support standards, required coursework and curriculum standards?
Language We had to design surveys and interviews, collect data, and write up progress reports. These all improved our writing ability. Through the process of actual interviews, debates, charity sales, and surveys, we were also able to improve our speaking and listening skills. So in all we improved each of the four main areas of language – listening, speaking, reading and writing. Math We used graphs to display data that we had collected from staff and students of our school to find out how much they knew about the bookstore. We also used a spreadsheet program to collate data about each event and team members’ contributions. Social Studies Using Small Small Bookstore as an example, we wanted to promote reading in our school and community. We did so by holding a second-hand book sale, and with our big brother/sister storytelling events. Art and Humanities We used our art skills to make ID badges, invitation cards, sandwich boards, posters and a lot more. We also used video and animation when designing the website.
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