OUR STORY

THE PROJECT
This project was done in response to a competition we found through an e-mail I received from Grassroots Canada. Looking to teach students how to publish information on their community through the internet, Grassroots offered a competition.

INFORMATION

Our site is called Community of River Heights. We are from Carpathia School in Winnipeg School Division #1 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. You can reach us at aguld@wsd1.org. The participating teacher is Anne Guld. Four students (11 years old) from both of our grade 6 classes were chosen to work on this project.

REFLECTION

Carpathia School is located at 300 Carpathia Rd. in River Heights, Winnipeg, Manitoba. We are a population of about 320 students ranging from Nursery to Grade 6.

Carpathia School has a number of students from military and immigrant families. Many of these people have reported using the internet to explore schools and help to learn more about their prospective school and area before arriving. We felt this was an important area to expand on and for this reason decided to join in on the project. Our project has links therefore to sites within River Heights, not necessarily within Winnipeg. We tried to think of what parents would be looking for within a comminuity and researched those places.

Our biggest obstacle in completing this project was time. As the students and teacher only met once every 6 school days, we were not able to complete the site in time for the evaluation.

In completing this site we used Front Page Express, Internet Explorer and a digital camera.

The project did not really relate to the grade 6 curriculum, it would have been excellent for grade 3's had the teacher been able to work with them on this. The students who did participate though had not used a web editor previously and so learned a new application and how to create a web page. Of course they were much more excited about learning and using the digital camera!

Many of the sites we researched in the community were contacted by phone. We explained what we were doing and why. People were very happy to help us out wity any information we needed.

If I was to repeat this activity again, I would allow more time. I would have organized my students a little better to have more areas researched and more "fun" sites posted. Recommendations to others would be to follow the excellent guideline supplied and provide for a lot of computer time as well as class time for discussion.