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1. Description of Our Team
The team members Lily, Emsley, Hamish, and Julius have decided to work together on their Doors To Diplomacy Project. They all go to SCIS (Shanghai Community International School), and all live in Shanghai, China.
Emsley is a 14 year old girl. She is originally American but she has lived in London her whole life before she moved to Shanghai. She has been living in Shanghai for three and a half years. Lily is a 15 year old girl. She is from Australia with an English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, and French background. She has been living in Shanghai for 6 months. Hamish is a 15 year old boy. He is a Sagitarian from Australia and has moved to Shanghai four years ago. Julius is a 16 years old boy. He is from Germany and moved to Shanghai about 8 months ago.
One could say that they are all good friends and nobody hesitated to join the group. Although they had their ups and downs during the last months, they all held together as a unit. Since only two of them are in the same English class, it was the groups responsibility to meet in their spare time, which they successfully did. They all agreed to pick the Death Penalty as their topic since they all think that it is an important topic that should concern everyone around the world. In the beginning, they didn’t pay a lot of attention to the project and just did what was mandatory. But to the end, they had a group meeting everyday and met even on sundays to make the project work. Despite that they would stay on one straight line until the end, they always had new ideas and changed their whole website three times. Many people helped them to realise their project and it would be impossible to name them all. Firstly they want to thank Ms. Brill, their English teacher, she always helped us to stay focused and inspired us with her motivation. Also we want to thank Greg Schellenberg, the had master of high school in SCIS, Dan Kerr, the head master of middle school in SCIS, Trent Lamb, leader of the LDS Church in Shanghai …
2. Summary of Our Project
We decided to pick the topic of Capital Punishment for our website. We knew that this might be a controversial choice but it was a topic that all of the group were interested in. In our website the aim is to educate and inform people about both the good and bad sides to Capital Punishment in general, all over the world. We also aim to show that the debate on capital punishment is an equal one and that there is no right or wrong opinion. Our website is also about how it is hard for different countries to agree on the same laws for the death penalty.
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:none
C. Connection speed used in the classroom:not sure
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):
As the government of China restricts access to certain websites on the internet one of our main problems was doing the research. We found it very difficult and frustrating at times because it was very hard to find information on the internet that was not already blocked. Also the internet in China is slow anyway, so even if the site we were going on was not blocked it took us a while to gather all the information because the website loaded very slow. For our website we used Wix. At first we were sing IWeb but we ran into many problems and we also decided that the Wix page looked better and suited out theme more. We switched websites so it took us about two days to figure out how to use the Wix website. Once we got the idea of it we found that it was much easier to use than the IWeb page that we were using before.
4. Problems We Had To Overcome
There were some complications that our group had to over come, such as a survey our group had done, the one on the website. This problem was an overreaction because we gave the site to the survey to our english teacher that we wanted people to take but only in our grade. She put it in the daily bulletin that our school reads out every morning to the students and a sixth grade teacher had their students take it. The head master got upset and it caused us to second think on the subject. Another complication we handled with was choosing a format for our website. At the beginning we were going to use iWeb because we thought it was the easiest and none of are tech people and know a lot about computers. Then we had some friends tell us about wix’s. Took us a couple of days to make sure we wanted to use it but as you can see in the end we did and it looks a lot better then it did. Our last main issue we had was the timing of the project. Our group lost time of the project and didn’t know if we weren’t meant to start getting pages done or even what to write about. Again as you can tell we pulled our group together and figured things out by ourselves and got the website done before the deadline. We all worked really hard on it and hope you all enjoy it as much as we did and also hope that you have learnt form both sides of our topic.
5. Our Project Sound Bite
Our participation in Doors to Diplomacy has meant a lot to our entire school. We have found that participating in such a world wide project has opened a new doors to us. We hope that one day we can enrich other peoples lives by educating and informing people about the issues of today of our troubled world.
6. How did your activities and research for this Doors to Diplomacy Project support standards, required coursework and curriculum standards?
In our project we have aimed for the highest standard of the curriculum requirements. We were made sure we followed all rules in completing this project. Doors to Diplomacy has opened up many doors to new opportunities to learn new skills. We all learnt how website designs and technology, which we believe is very important because it is empowering to the future generation. We all have a better understanding and appreciation of the specific topic, Capital Punishment. The curriculum of our English class this year has included many skills which are going to help us through of many years of school yet to come.
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