School: Uzhur Additional education center for children
    Uzhur, Krasnoyarsk Region, Russian Federation

4 students, ages 15-16 worked together to complete this CyberFair project on March 16, 2011. They have participated in CyberFair in the following year(s): 2011

Classes and Teachers: Anna Ilyushenko

E-Mail contact:

Our School's Web Site: http://rc.do.am/

1. Description of Our Community

Uzhur is a small Siberian town situated about 300 kilometers from the city of Krasnoyarsk and surrounded by fields. The main industry is agriculture. Our county is the biggest crops producer in the region. It is famous dairy and meat products. Uzhur is a crossroad town because there are some roads through it to the beautiful lakes that are famous in Russia and abroad. The town is developing fast but people want to preserve their heritage as well. Our school is a place where children get together and take some extra classes. We are also involved in some projects to support our community in different ways.

2. Summary of Our Project

This project is aimed at giving people of the world some interesting information about our home town including facts about its specialities, industry, entertainment and famous people to create some kind of a town profile in English. It would make our town to be more open and attractive for people to come including tourists. We would also like to describe some problems of our community and offer some ways to solve them. Our goal here is to encourage people especially children to think locally and work on development of our community.

3. Our Computer and Internet Access

A. Percentage of students using the Internet at home:21-50%

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):

Two of the students from our team have Internet at home, the other two use internet with their mobile phones. We also have Internet in special computer labs at schools.

4. Problems We Had To Overcome

Though we didn't have a lot of obstacles there was some confusion at first. The topic we decided to develop was too broad and we had to decide what to include in it. There were also difficulties in searching the information as most of it is not systematic. We had to look for the pieces of data everywhere.

5. Our Project Sound Bite

This project would help our people to see their local community as a part of global world, to present their local heritage and to show their concerns about community problems as a part of 'Specialties'. Figuring out the big picture is the way to start working on making our town better.

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

Russian education is being reformed now to meet the new educational standards. This project helped the students to gain some skills like searching for information, interviewing people, writing articles, translating into English and web design techniques. They acquired very useful experience implementing those skills for creating a real object that will be serving not just for the Cyberfair but also as one of the community web sites. They leaned to work as a team managing a complicated project. It was also a great example of project approach in education that people in Russia are just starting to implement.

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

Students used a variety of things such as different types of computers both at home and at school, mobile phones to coordinate our work, 2 digital cameras, Skype teleconferencing software to discuss our work in progress, they visited the local museum and library, they interviewed some people and used open Internet resources to complete different tasks. We used trail version of Dreamweaver software to do web design of our web site. As we tried to use mostly open sources to didn't need a lot of funding for that.

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

As the main goal of our project is to represent our community in the would our team definitely act as ambassadors. They are eager to show that our community is open and ready for cooperation. We would like to make friends with people around the would and discuss things we have in common.

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

This profile will give unique information about our community for people around the would. There was no resource in English before. During our work we had very productive cooperation with our town officials and business executives. These pages are regularly viewed by students of our school and their parents. Most of them liked the concept and its implementation and some of them gave the project team new ideas on developing the resource. Some local teachers of English would like to use this resource.

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

Some members of our community granted their images, others gave their time giving the interview. Mikhail Bukhtoyarov, the teacher of our school helped a lot as a consultant in web design.

5) Discoveries, Lessons and Surprises (Optional)

The students discovered a lot of interesting information on our community that was new for them. We improved our skills of teamwork and ready for new projects!