1. Description of Our Community
Uzhur is the capital of our county and its administrative and cultural center. It is located in a beautiful place by two small rivers among fields and forests. Uzhur is a small Siberian town with the rich history. It was involved in many historical events. People of different backgrounds and nationalities live here. It is far from big cities so the town was able to keep a special atmosphere where you can feel the history. People who come here to visit usually enjoy the living history of our small Russian city a lot.
2. Summary of Our Project
Our project is devoted to the Local Heritage Museum. It is a very special place for our town and the community.It contains natural and historical exhibits which can tell us a lot about the environment and ourselves. In our opinion this wonderful museum is not well-known enough outside Uzhur. So we would like to tell the world about the history of Siberian nature and people through the museum. Upon agreement with the museum director, we would like to promote the project in our region and beyond. We are doing that for our friends, families and the whole community.
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
For all the students it is the first experience in web design and international project management. It took a lot of learning to acquire research techniques and source citing ethics. Most of the students are under thirteen and they go to different schools. So it was their first experience in project team building.
5. Our Project Sound Bite
Our goal was to do something really meaningful and important for the community. We decided to promote Uzhur Local Heritage Museum as one of the main community-building places. Our local museum presents our town as a very special place and at the same time makes it a part of the bigger picture - Russian and World history!
6. How did your activities and research for this CyberFair Project support standards, required coursework and curriculum standards?
As our project was about Uzhur Local Museum the students learned a lot of material that perfectly fits the context of Regional Studies class. Though this class is the part of the school curriculum it is usually not simple to make students be genuinely interested in local studies. They often consider this material to be too familiar. But when local studies are integrated with English and Web design it becomes more interesting for them. The team had to learn a lot of new skills like web design and project planning based on the local studies. This task as well as the idea of “doing that for community” creates much better motivation for the topic itself.
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