School: Shanghai Community International School
    Shanghai, Shanghai, China

3 students, ages 14-15 worked together to complete this Doors to Diplomacy project on November 24, 2012. They have participated in Doors to Diplomacy in the following year(s): 2009

Classes and Teachers: Amy Brill, Elaine, Juanita, Kyra

E-Mail contact:

Our School's Web Site: http://

1. Description of Our Team

Amy Brill- She is our teacher/coach that helped us with the project. She made dates and deadlines on specific information that was due. She organized all the teams and gave us suggestions on how to make the project better.

Kyra- She is 14 years old. She wrote all the parts of the website that we needed including the Poverty tab, the Diplomacy tap, and she organized our works cited together. She also edited the writing.

Elaine- She is 14 years old. She designed the whole website and published it. She found all the pictures, and the map. She did some editing of the paragraphs and works cited pages as well.

Juanita- She is 14 years old. She wrote her own biography and helped encourage some videos.

They decided to do this project together because Kyra and Juanita are the writers and editors of the project and Elaine is the website designer and tech person.

2. Summary of Our Project

Our Doors to Diplomacy website is made to encourage the eradication of poverty in various parts of the world(Ethiopia, China, and India) We are going to explore what role diplomacy can play in the eradication of poverty.

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:more than 6

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):

For the Youtube video in the poverty tab, you must have a Youtube proxy or have access to Youtube to view the video.

Also IF you click our website and everything on the page is disorganized, all there needs to be done is to keep refreshing the page until everything is organized. Wix sometimes has this problem with our website.

4. Problems We Had To Overcome

One technical obstacle was the Youtube poverty video that Elaine needed to upload to the website. She doesn't have access to Youtube. She tried converting it but Wix wouldn't allow that file unless its a youtube link. She asked her friend to find the exact same link on youtube. Once she retrieved that, she put the link on the website and now it works. It works for people who have access to Youtube or have a Youtube proxy. Another barrier we overcame, was losing one team member half-way through the year. Because she was going to be the main researcher and one of the writers, Kyra, Elaine, and Juanita, all had to work extra hard to research and write.

5. Our Project Sound Bite

Kyra, Juanita, and Elaine think that their poverty website for Doors to Diplomacy has changed there perspective on poverty and how it should be history. They hope the website could influence others around the world to make poverty history as well.

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

This project supported our content standards, required coursework, and curriculum requirements. Our school is a huge promoter of communication, higher level thinking, and appreciation of our global community. This project promoted all of these. We learned how to communicate what is going on in our world through a website. From this project, we also discovered how differently people from different countries view things. We are all American, but when people from different countries read our site, they had different thoughts on things. We learned many things using the internet. Teachers tend to leave out some information and make it nicer for us to hear. Using the internet as a teacher, gained us access to information that we wouldn't necessarily discover.

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

For this project, we used a variety of electronic sources. Each of us used our own personal laptops. At school, only Juanita was able to gain access to all sites, owing to the fact that she is the only one who has a VPN (Virtual Private Network) on her computer. When Kyra and Elaine did research during class, they had to go through China's internet, which blocks many informative sites. Luckily, Kyra has a VPN at home that she was able to use.

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

We all acted as ambassadors for our Doors to Diplomacy project. We told our fellow students about our website. Many of them went on and read it. After reading it, they asked us insightful questions which we answered. We also promoted our website over the internet. We posted the link on Facebook and told all our friends to visited. Additionally, Kyra posted the website on Skype. This allowed people to visit it and become involved.

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

If our website reaches a national audience, then I think it will make a difference in pushing to eradicate poverty. Our goal with this project was to open the audiences eyes to the issue of poverty. We've really received some good feedback on our website.

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

We had two main helpers Joan Tarasevich and our English teacher Amy Brill. Ms. Brill was essential in helping us make sure that our website was grammatically on key. Joan Tarasevich who is a team members mother was essential in helping us with research that would be necessary in making our project more factual than speculative.

5) Discoveries, Lessons and Surprises (Optional)

The most interesting we found while researching the issues on poverty, was that there are so many views on poverty and it seems that any two authors of certain articles seem to contradict each other, while another two may think exactly the same thing. Even though people have different opinions on the issue, one thing is always clear they agree on what the problem is. People just don't agree on the best way to solve the problem.