1. Description of Our Community
For the past 20 years, not only has Ms. Lihwa Lin been the mainstay of the voluntary crossing-guard team in Xisong Elementary School, but also played an important role in the voluntary crossing-guard team in Songshan District. In addition to the schoolchildren of Xisong, she guards all the schoolchildren in Taipei City via the transfer of her experience in volunteering.
2. Summary of Our Project
Most of time, we think crossing guards are nothing. However, we can going to school and going home safely without them.
This project is aimed to understand why these voluntary crossing guards are willing to serve us under the risks and even without pay. We therefore focus on interviewing Ms. Lihwa Lin who has been a voluntary crossing guard for over 20 years.
We have contacted Ms. Lin many times. Thanks to Ms. Lin who we call Auntie Lin. Auntie Lin believes that all efforts will be worthy as schoolchildren can be safe on their travel between school and home. The volunteers never ask for any payback. They set a good example of devoting themselves to others for us.
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:1
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):
Internet environment of our school: Computer labs. Each computer terminal in our computer lab is connected to an optical cable and linked to the Taipei City Educational Network Center and then to the Taiwan Academic Network (TANet). We mostly made use of the noon-time break, afterschool hours, and morning self-study sessions to discuss about our project, search and generate webpage contents, and organize our data.
4. Problems We Had To Overcome
1. Taking more time to organize the data
Sometimes there is too much data that has be looked through one by one and the wrong ones have to be deleted; these things require a lot of patient help from everyone. After interviewing the teachers and principal, the recordings have to be transcribed. Since we typed very slowly, sometimes the teachers talked a lot, and we have to listen to it over and over again, taking a long time.
2. Difficulties in recording
When typing reflections or recording issues, sometimes the writing for the records is too ugly making us unable to type the reflections. Now we have to look at the focus records, and think about it again before writing, and avoid the same problems.
3.Interview skill is not good
At first when we interviewed the principal and the teachers, we were scared of asking questions, but later we got used to it, and this made us excited again. When we interviewed the rhythm band teacher, we became more confident, and we were also not afraid when asking other rhythm band teachers over the years.
5. Our Project Sound Bite
We had done the video-taping twice with Auntie Lin, and every time Auntie Lin told us a lot of being a votary crossing guard. We hope we can invite more people to be voluntary crossing guards to serve others via this project.
6. How did your activities and research for this CyberFair Project support standards, required coursework and curriculum standards?
Our project is to introduce the volunteers devoting themselves to help our children at school. We'd like to analyze the development and difficulties confronting the volunteers. Besides the volunteers, we also surveyed the teachers, parents and children in order to fully understand the members at our school and in our community.
Through this project, we hope our children may understand the volunteers more and be willing to take part in different volunteering activities in the future.
In the process of our project, we applied what we learned from different areas. Doing the interviews, we need the skills from Mandarin class. We know how to process and analyze the data by the knowledge we learned in math class. We know our society's situation and the volunteers from social science class. In computer class, we learned how to search the information on the Internet and how to build our web pages with computers.
We experienced a four-month production process involving a lot of processes, such as discussion, interviewing, recording, and sharing. We learned how to use many software and hardware, such as digital cameras, camcorders. We rarely use these in daily life, so this was a great opportunity. The influence on us was that through this research, we can better understand the importance of division of labor and cooperation. When students from different classes work hard together in the computer classroom, we can get to know more classmates, and it made us better friends!
Internet could be the most useful medium throughout our project. We searched the information of volunteers from all communities. We exchanged information and our point of views on community website.
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