CyberFair Project ID: 7664

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International Schools CyberFair Project Narrative
Title: Our School 'Styx'
Category: 3. Business and Community Organizations
URL: http://www.school-styx.com
Bibliography: http://school-styx.com/bibliography.php

School: State school ' Styx' specialized in English
    Pavlodar, , Kazakhstan

14 students, ages 11-15 worked together to complete this CyberFair project on January 7, 2014. They have participated in CyberFair in the following year(s): none

Classes and Teachers: Gass Svetlana Alexsandrovna, Sivirinova Tatyana Sergeevna, 5 grade, 7grade

E-Mail contact:

Our School's Web Site: http://goo.kz/index/fromorg/59

Project Overview

1. Description of Our Community

We consider our school to be our 'local community'.Our school 'Styx' was opened in 1994 in Kazakhstan ,in the regional city,Pavlodar.Our school is a state one and partially a private one. The children of the school are the citizens of Pavlodar and are interested in studying English,German,French,Kazakh. Our students are the winners of the city,region,republic olimpiads in these languages.Our students take an active part in different children activitis,festivals,contests,concerts and they are winners of the most of them.The staff of teachers is competent.We cooperate with the Tomsk State University, Novosibirsk Medical Academy in Russia.Our leavers live and work in all parts of our world.At school we have computers in every classroom.We have two computer classrooms with 10 computers in every classroom.We have 2 gyms,a video hall, a canteen, a library.The school is two-storied building with a large beautiful schoolyard and a sportground.Our children play different games in their free time.At the sportground our students play football and other sport games.The children are of different nationalities. They are russian,kazakh,ukraine,greek,germen,tatars.We have 11 classes.At our school we have different creative groups.They are Global Community.The goal of the club is to communicate with Global community and to get to know more about the students's life in the world. Another creative group named ' A healthy Way of life'.The goal of the club is to propagande a healthy way of life.Besides we have a scintific club,a sport club,a vocal club,a dance club and others. We have creative meetings with famous actors of Kazakhstan and Russia.

2. Summary of Our Project

We decided to make an International Schools CyberFair Web Project about our school.Our school was opened in 1994 by Styopkin Yuriy Ivanovich, a director of our school, with the help of a group of initiative teachers. Yuriy Ivanovich had a great desire to create the school which one will be a new school in that period of Perestroika that our country had been enduring in that difficult for our country time. It is an innovative school now. The idea was to create nontraditional school which would have new progressive effective methodology for educating new generation of students who would be ready to live in a new society and would create new modern and progressive society in our country. We would like to get to know what school life was in our school and compare it with our school life at present. Now we prefer to use computers in our studying. But some old teachers who worked earlier don’t like computers. They say that it is bad for our health. Some parents think that they learned with the help of books only and they have excellent education. Our new teachers use computers at the lessons and we work on computers now. So our school life is different than it was at the beginning. The learning process is different. We interviewed veterans who worked at our school, teachers, leavers of the school, our students, watched some video, searched internet sites, took part in our new and traditional school events, organized the activity ' Our School in Future'. And we defined what is different now, what is the same at our school,and dreamt about our school in future and shared our ideas on our web-page.

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:2-3

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):

At the school we have computers and an internet access in every classroom.We have two computer classrooms and a library with 10 computers in every classroom.There are sufficient host servers at the school. We have Wi-Fi connection.The school has IT department to provide teachers and students a convenient and multi-service network environment with websites, mails, and so on. For working on the Internetional schools CyberFair project students use their extra-time, study hall time to build up the website. Besides students can use mobile phones,email to share their ideas.

4. Problems We Had To Overcome

1. As a teacher of my students I had the problem that I work at this school for a period of 4 months and I didn’t know the school. Besides I am a supervisor at the school for the first time. But it was my own great motivation to choose this “local community” and to work on the project. 2. Students began to work on this kind of project for the first time and needed to have clear objectives, tasks. 3. We couldn’t work in team work at the beginning. We couldn’t listen to each other, to distribute our responsibility and to attend our duties,to manage our work. 4. We don’t have school museum. 5. It was a problem to order our working time because we study at school from 8.20. till 16.00.But we had a great desire. Finally, we chose optimal time for interviewing on Saturday and during our dinner time. 6.Students had weak writing skills using the keyboard. 7.Our teachers and director have a lot of work: lessons, activities, preparatory work for lessons, filling in the documents. And our parents helped us in it. They made arrangements for our interview by the phone. And we interviewed our director and our teachers. They were very glad to tell us how they began their tedious work connected with opening the new school and making it famous and authoritative. 8. Most leavers live in other countries and they are always busy as all grown-ups. But all of them were glad to meet us ( on skipe, by the phone) and to get to remember their wonderful, unforgettable school years. New ideas of our website began to appear, we began to communicate with each other and listen to each other. We began to understand how interesting people work at our school. We were inspired to write about it and to write about our future.

5. Our Project Sound Bite

'Our participation has meant how wonderful our teachers,our school,our students,our parents are and our created close collaboration will expand and a wonderful global collaboration will be created' 'It is an exciting activity which helped us to be leaders in it,to work in team,to make our communication effective,interesting,amazing and helped us to create students' product-website and to appear ideas about our taking part in advertising our school,it made us think about our great role in the life of the community and it made us think about our future school and about our future life.'

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

Our project follows the specific idea of CyberFair school “Inspire and Unite”. Our project follows our state standards of education and fit into state curriculum guidelines. Different kind of activities such as interview, questionnaire, survey, discussion, writing factfiles, searching sites, analysis, making the website helped students to improve 1.language skills;2.Management skills: responsibility for their project working, team work, collaboration, planning and organizing autonomous and team-working, leadership,evaluation;3.Multiple intelligence;4.Problem-solving Skills: to hold talks,to draw a conclusion, make numerous attempts and corrections to solve the problems in the research. 6. Economics skills: knowledge about business school with limited liability We did complementary tasks in which the group members interacted with one another and motivated one another to produce our group web-project. Now we better understand the specific form of our school with limited liability. One of the modern objectives of our school is to teach students with project-based technology.Now the 10th graders at our school study English with blog-technology.Our educational system is on the way to have e-learning education.But not all teachers at our school have computer skills.In our class we have bad writing skills and can’t effectively use a computer in studying.Our role in our school community is great.We can take part and organize the school events.Our results show how our educational system works. The using the Internet for teaching and learning has been more effective than traditional methods because we can 1.find the information we need immediately; 2. showcase themselves; 3. share the ideas;4. learn autonomously; 5.have more interesting lessons; 6.see our results when it is cosy for us; 7.communicate with the global world.

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Project Elements

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

All students have computers at home.We have two computer classrooms where we worked on the project. We used 1.computers, laptops: to collect information, to find the leavers of the school, to use software to decorate the pictures, to arrange the writing topics, data statistics, to integrate web pages 2. telephone: to contact and communicate with each other, with leavers of our school, with parents, with organizations working with our school.3.digital cameras: to take photos of our visits and interview, 4.scanner:to scan photos, documents, 5.computer software: Word, Excel; 6.libraries: to find information about school; 7.email: to invite guests, to arrange meetings, to send messages. 8. Internet: Internet browsing previous winning entries, search related information about School “Styx”. 9. Printer: to print writing reports, information about school. All tools are at our schools. Telephones belong to students. The most valuable tool was Internet because we could find most people we wanted to interview. And we learned how to do web-page. We were involved in it with excitment.

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

1. We interviewed teachers, director, administrators, supervisors, leavers of the school, the director of the Educational Department of our city, students of the school. We learned about the school organization from the opening of the school till the present time. We learned the business philosophy of the school “Styx”, the model of educational system at the school, the historical facts of the school life at school, the modern school life at “Styx”. 2. Visiting and checking in person: We visited library, classrooms, gym, canteen. We knew what had changed there. We visited our school library, our city library to get to know the information about our school from newspapers, magazines. 3. Searching the Internet in person: We searched the information about “Styx” on websites of our city, the City Educational Department. 4. Experience: we took part in school events and conducted the discussion on the theme “What is traditional and what is new at our school”. The teachers, leavers who had been working at school for a long period also took part in the discussion. 5. We understood that we should be active participants of our school life and we created the model of future school organization. 6. We developed the website. Every student could learn more about the school “Styx”. It was also an effective advertisement for our school.

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

Our project will make a difference in our community.We will have a new form of global communication. The school is a member of the Global school and it will follow the global project programmes to make our life in the world more interesting, more wonderful and better.We will have school partners in the global world.We hope we will have suggestions to take part in business projects. People in our community have learned the historical and today data about the school.The school was the first new business school in Kazakhstan. This year we have the innovative educational programme “Business English Through the Web Technology' at our school. The school ”Styx” teaches students to be ready to pass international exams and to be able to study at the universities abroad, to be adapted in the competitive global world. This creative work helped the students to learn to interview,to improve critical thinking,to analyze,to work in team. The teachers gave interview and tried to think and analyze their working and the whole educational process for students and not only for city educational department. Teachers and leavers have learned about the fact that our students are creative, initiative, active personalities. We have the closer working relationship between our teachers, students, parents. We have established the new form of communication based on collaboration, responsibility, team-work with the help of the project work. The schools of our city, of Kazakhstan and of the world have looked at our web pages. We have new school partners from Greece and from the USA.Our parents are more involved in our learning process.Through our research, interviews, and communicative activities we believe and hope that we truly had an exceptional impact on our community.

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

1. Community Members helped us with data checking, searching the information about the school,the tutors of the project work helped us in planning of the steps of our project,our surveys,the interviews,providing editorial feedback, assisting in surveys, questionnaires and interviews. 2. Our parents helped us to meet with the leavers of the school,our director and assist in revisions. 3. Participating teachers and students,leavers of the school, our parents,our director’s hard work gave us the opportunity to showcase us, to submit our finished product to our beautiful global world.We are grateful to them. 4. We are mostly grateful to the founders of the Global School Net and CyberFair for their suggestion,the idea of international collaboration and communication and for their great help in organization of the contest and our taking part in it. We thank the CyberFair moderators for their help in answering our questions when we need it. We convey our thanks again to all those who have helped us.

5) Discoveries, Lessons and Surprises (Optional)

We made interesting discoveries working on the International Cyber Fair project: 1. We knew the brilliant idea of Cyber Fair international web-project and we liked it very much. 2. We learned how to make web pages,to use some computer programmes,to use computer not only for playing games. We had an initial experience of drawing with tablet computers,design of photos,web-pages. 3. We learned how to work in team and to listen to each other, to respect classmates’ ideas, thoughts,to share our opinions. 4. We learned to manage our work,to be leaders,managers,interviewers,analysts. 5. We learned how to showcase us. 6. We learned how to communicate effectively and involve and motivate other participants to take part in our project. 7. We learned how to write progress report in English.We improved our writing skills, printing skills using keyboard. 8. We knew the historical data about school. We are proud of the fact that our school was the first new business private school in Kazakhstan. And many respectful representatives of many countries visited us to get the information how our school worked with the desire to open the same kind of school in their place of living. 9. We learned how the company with limited liability works.

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View our CyberFair Project (Project ID: 7664)

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