1. Description of Our Community
Siberian town Uzhur has the population of only 15000 people. Most of them work for agriculture. Here you can find delicious cheese and meat, vegetables and bread. Uzhur is famous for its farming products all over the region. The town is surrounded by beautiful fields, hills and forests. It has a long history starting with the ancient tribes. The town keeps its traditions. That is the place where history and modern era exist together.
2. Summary of Our Project
We often look for historical heritage in old buildings, but we seldom notice the plates with Street Names on these buildings. But the names of the streets are historical heritage as well! A friend of our team who is originally from Great Britain once noticed that Street Names in Uzhur are the mirror of Russian history. Some of them are really hard to translate because it has a lot of context, stories and people's stories and lives in their meaning. So we decided to do the research on our town streets and their names. It is a journey to the past that is inside the present. Do you want to join us? Look at the map of Uzhur!
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:4-6
C. Connection speed used in the classroom:dedicated connection
D. Number of years our classroom has been connected to the Internet:more than 6
4. Problems We Had To Overcome
Being very creative the project team had very little experience with planning, developing and testing the websites. So they had to learn a lot of new skills on the fly. As there was very limited material on the topic. So they had to do a lot of research to get the information and a lot planning on how to make it presentable in this format.
5. Our Project Sound Bite
Street names reflect the character of the city! We use them every day without thinking but they really show us the ways people present themselves and the place where they live. Certainly they can tell us so much about the history. But they also show us how local people establish something they are proud of and something they want to remember about themselves!
6. How did your activities and research for this CyberFair Project support standards, required coursework and curriculum standards?
The most obvious benefit of the project was the students’ first practical experience on how to do the research project. The material is very much related to Regional Studies class but thanks to the competition we had a chance to have a fresh view on the topic. Students learned how to extract data, analyze and categorize it. Of course they also contributed a lot to English language learning in practice. That is not very common for Uzhur, a remote Siberian town where the students have very little chance to really practice a different language. The project gave them a great opportunity to apply their knowledge for something very practical.
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