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1. Description of Our Team
Marcello, Edward, Jacob and Khoi have all joined together to work on this project, Doors to Diplomacy for their English project. They currently all live in Shanghai and attend the Shanghai Community International School. The students in this group are all currently in 9th Grade.
Marcello is 15 years old. He has lived in China for 4 years already and is half American, half Polish. Edward is 14 years old. He grew up in Australia, but is originally from Singapore. He has lived in China for almost 1 and a half years. Khoi is 15 years old. He is French, originally from Vietnam. Khoi has lived in China for 10 years and has explored almost all of it. Jacob is 15 years old coming from the South part of Sweden. This is his 4th year in China and plans on moving the following year.
Three of them are in the same English class which made a whole lot things easier in terms of communication within the group. Also, because all 4 are good friends and are all in the swim team, they decided to be a group since they cooperate well together and they share common interest. They decided to pick the topic CSR because they realized how important CSR is to the world and all members of the group were interested in business.
In terms of cooperation, some group members tended to drift off and needed prodding from each other. Also, during the last few weeks before the due date, two team members fell sick which killed part some time. Despite that each group member shared work equally, trying to work on the project whenever they had spare time.
There were two main people that helped pull this whole project together. Firstly, of course Ms. Brill, their English teacher helped them focus and guide them towards completion of the website. Another helpful person was Mr. Hesslevik, a parent of one of the group members. They were troubled when they were researching the project until Mr. Hesslevik gave them a CSR PPT presentation. He also introduced this topic to them.
2. Summary of Our Project
The group decided to pick Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as their topic because all group members were interested in business. They narrowed it down to two specific areas, China & Africa. They chose these two countries because they're still developing countries and rules need to be incorporated in terms of CSR. This group created a website explaining why these countries should apply for CSR and some of the rules that have to be applied when being part of the CSR community. Also, they explained how Diplomacy takes action to help CSR develop in the two countries.
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:2-3
E. Additional comments concerning your computer and/or Internet access (Optional):
As the government of China restricts people from accessing some websites such as Facebook, Youtube, and various other sites, it was difficult to find some resources on the internet. It was also hard for them to share links and their website through social websites as everything was blocked. When using search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, they also encountered problems. Sometimes when searching matters related specifically to China, they'd instantly block you. This happened to us countless times which frustrated most of us. Also, since the internet is fairly slow in general in China, they constantly got irritated and were easily in frustration. Despite that, since all group members had a Virtual Private Network (VPN), all members could bypass this firewall and access all restricted websites.
4. Problems We Had To Overcome
Most of the time, there was no problems during the project. However, the main issue was uploading and publishing the website. During the stages of editing the website, we had to constantly publish the website. Whenever we attempted to publish the website, it would work successfully 1/3 times. Some of these problems include, pictures not showing up, content not showing accordingly and videos were missing. Each member had all the information needed to be uploaded but there were issues with the uploading process.
When uploading photos, errors kept showing up and information put on the website would not save. Also, when publishing the website, things did not show up as expected. For an example the format was wrong once uploaded and everything shifted. Another issue was that some of them were editing at the time, causing things to be saved and things to be removed. So when they checked again later, photos and text was missing.
They later on fixed the problem by waiting a few hours and trying again. When they tried again. Everything went right. It was probably because the host website (Weebly) was having some issues at the moment when they put everything together.
In addition, uploading the banner was another problem they had to overcome. One of the group members created a banner which was a gif. file. The banner was supposedly animated however, weebly wasn't cooperating and rejected the file. According to the website, it clearly states it accepts gif. files however, the results clearly weren't showing when we attempted to upload the gif. file. They tried uploading the banner several times and investigated deeper into the problem. Eventually, they couldn't figure out the problem so they simply created a new banner and ensured it wasn't a gif. file. Later one of the members figured they were able to upload as a gif. file but not in the banner section. One of the team members found use of it as having it on the end of pages to help advertise our support.
5. Our Project Sound Bite
This project has been a really good learning experience for all the members of the group. They have learned to work in a group cooperatively under any circumstance. It has taught them the importance of teamwork and has built there bond of friendship to another level.
6. How did your activities and research for this Doors to Diplomacy Project support standards, required coursework and curriculum standards?
Our Doors to Diplomacy project addressed CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) under economics and business. The project was a large part of our English class and is being graded.
The group practice key concepts like teamwork and effort. Through the project each of us benefited from working on this, learning more about business and the world around us.
The role a simple student can play in the world is large, with lots of work they can accomplish anything. We hope to be able to spread the detail about our issue and find a way to solve it.
The internet has helped us in so many ways. Yes, we could go to the library and research there but the web is the world wide library full of information to be accessed. With something so quick and easy, it is very effective.
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