4th Online Contest -EEEP DTPE
period 2011-2012
"Create digitally, construct a website,
become ambassadors for your town "
DETAILED OUTLINE OF WORK IMPLEMENTATION
A. General Information
Project Title: "Folklore Museum of Kozani: The jewel of our town"
Class participation: 5th category - Sights
Connecting with our participation (link): http://2epal-kozan.koz.sch.gr/ergasia
Title of department / class / group: group of students from section III Computer EPA.L
Teachers involved: Andrew Kreouza , Psalida Katerina, Vassilis Hasiotis.
Number of students participating in this project: 8
Aged: 17-18 years
Email communication with the coordinator of work:
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B. Description of our region
Kozani is the capital and largest town in the region of Western Macedonia and its respective prefecture. It is situated among the mountains of Vermion, Bourinos and Pieria.
Kozani is home to the University of Western Macedonia and the Technological Educational Institute (TEI) in the same region.
The city is known for its contribution to the country's electricity supply, and a large proportion of the population works in the thermoelectric plants of D.E.I, which generate electricity with coal as raw material. Other local products are marble, saffron, fruit, wines and various kinds of specialized craft. The area of Kozani is the only one all around the country where saffron is cultivated; in some villages (Saffron, Karyditsa, Agia Paraskevi, Ano Komi, Kato Komi, Lefkopigi, Petrana etc.) there has been made a systematic cultivation of the plant for many years.
C. Summary of our work
Our work presents the Folklore Museum of our town, which is a real gem for us. We will guide you on each and every floor and its exhibits since the Folklore Museum is an integral part of the local history and culture. We will also refer to the rich history and beauty of our town, visiting its sights (mansions, the paper holder, the church of St. Nicholas, the library, the belfry) and will take a walk to the main square starting from the cultural events that are characterized by their particular local colour.
In this work, the students who enthusiastically participated visited the museum and captured video and pictures of the exhibits. They spoke with the curator of the museum and collected information about the places where the exhibits were found, the donations and the folklore of the region. They looked through historical sources and gathered information about the history of Kozani.
They learned how to make a team work, cooperated in their little spare time and discovered the value of teamwork.
D. Problems in the course of our work
During the project implementation stage the main problems were
a) meeting the deadlines of our work as defined by the organizers of the competition due to time constraints since the group of students who took part in the contest were students of the third class preparing for the University Entrance Exams.
b) some technical issues we had to solve (e.g. the size of the videos, their uploading to the school web server). Other than that, we had no particular problems. This was mainly due to the fact that the students? specialty offers them familiarity with the new technologies as well as with the programs of multimedia data processing and web authoring programs.
E. Main description of our work - the basics
How our activities and our research with this work for the online educational competition "Create digitally, construct a website, become ambassadors for your town" complemented the teaching of individual sections of the course curriculum.
Our work matched perfectly with the state school curriculum for the IT sector of EPAL. The students edited photos and video clips with programs (Photoshop, Premier) they learned in the "Multimedia" course of the third class. They designed and developed the website with html and php (with the help of joomla), with languages and programs that they learned as part of their computer lessons in the second class ("Programming tools for the Internet" and "Basic Web Services").
What new we learned - what new ideas we worked out.
At the end of our work, we all, students and teachers, became richer in knowledge and experiences.
It was exciting the enthusiasm of the students when they could use the knowledge they gained in workshops to implement their own work. They discovered that the lessons, which sometimes seemed tedious and perhaps useless, turned out to be useful helping them give shape to their own work.
We found that when a student is asked to create something of his/her own, however small it is, the experience he/she gains is incomparably larger than that which is gained through traditional teaching methods.
Most texts were drawn up by students and edited by teachers, who helped students to develop their writing skills and be able to express the information they collected in a nice and understandable way.
The tools and information technologies used.
To carry out our work, the students used the school photocopier (for printed reproduction of their material). They also used digital cameras and digital camcorders to capture both images and videos, as well as printed material from the museum and the public library. They used a desktop scanner, found in the computer lab, to digitize printed material, especially photographs, and text editors, image, audio and video processing programs as well as web design programmes and a web browser.
The ways in which we became (with our work) "ambassadors" for the local community through the Internet.
Working as a team, we managed to get the students and teachers of our school know the site who, then, excited by the results, talked to their friends and acquaintances.
We let the schools in our area know about our site address and students posted it in facebook. We informed the local electronic media about our work. We made an entry of our site in network search engines, so that potential questions for our region, its attractions or the Folklore Museum find their answers in our work; moreover, we ensured that findings to the above questions are included in the results provided by search engines.
Also, through our school site, visitors and friends, can access our work.
Through this work, our students have provided the incentive for many education authorities to reflect on the traditional school model and the need for its substantial modernization as well as its adaptation and the creative adoption of ICT in education.
Impact of our work in our local community (school, neighborhood, district).
Once we decided to take part in the contest, the entire team started working with great enthusiasm.
We started discussions and contacts with several members of the local community. First, inquiries were made to the Board of the museum to secure the necessary permission to use printed material and shoot videos and photos of the museum. As soon as we let them know the topic of our project, we encountered a positive attitude and the museum authorities were willing to help us. We were given permit to proceed and began our visits to the Folk Museum to gather material.
We visited the town library, the paper holder, and the mansions. We discussed the topic of our project and collected information. Teachers and elderly members of our local community, full of memories and knowledge talked about the local history, the history of the museum, the history of sights and cultural events organised throughout the years.
Everyone helped willingly and encouraged us. They all experienced a "sweet" desire to help and a secret pride. They could see their children, the children of the neighbourhood or of the adjacent school, their friends, use the Internet not to play games or get into Facebook, but open a "window" to knowledge.
Many parents, teachers and other members of our local community requested details of the contest, the use of the Internet as an educational instrument, the use of computers in education and asked to be kept informed of the course of work.
How other members of our community participated in our work helping as volunteers.
The installation of joomla, the apache, the transfer of joomla from the PC to the server and the editing of the texts were done by the teachers.
In order to collect the material, students were provided with many helpful books and documents. Moreover, Mr. Dimitris Papaconstantinou, a teacher at our school dealing with amateur photography, offered his photos of various parts of the museum because students were unable to shoot good photos without flash.
The contribution of the teacher of our school, miss Papadopoulou Parthena, was of great importance, as she was the one who, together with our students, edited and undertook the text correction in English.
As written above, all those aware of the activities related to our work, parents, teachers, education and local authorities, were positive towards our project and encouraged us. They know and have heard of the rapid technological developments in information technology and its use in everyday life, and are optimistic about its creative use in education, hoping to improve the level of education. They hope that with the use of the Internet in education, educational activities that promote cooperation and understanding of the peculiarities of the peoples will spread and will contribute to universal education. They encouraged us to continue such activities through the Internet and promised that they will take new technologies into account when designing educational policies in order to disseminate new technologies in schools.
Discoveries ? unexpected situations - surprises
Students who used to be relatively indifferent before the project pleasantly surprised their teachers with their strong motivation and participation in the student work! They proved they have plenty of potential which they made use of in time, benefiting both the group and themselves.
Throughout the entire process until the work was complete, students began to realize the value of their land and its history.
Especially in the difficult times our country is going through, they realized that our wealth and our values are our history and our culture. They are our treasure which no one can take away from us.
The fact that they became ambassadors for their country filled them with pride and more responsibility.