OVERVIEW

Description of Our Team

Our team consists of two 6th graders,  Nana (11) and Nathan (12), and three 8th graders, Mary, Florence and Yuhki (all 14).  We were invited by Mrs. O'C-P (our Language Arts/Social Studies teacher) to be a part of the team, so we thought about it, asked our parents, and signed up!  Mrs. O'Connor-Palacios was our main mentor and was the organizer/task master/cheerleader for the project. Our technical advisor was Mr. Fincher, who dealt with everything from server crashes to minimizing the load time on our pages to saving us from the dreaded edit conflicts.  

Because we are from different grade levels, we decided that we would follow our respective curriculums to determine who did what.  For example, Nathan and Nana worked on South Africa because this is what we studied in 6th grade, Florence became the Japan expert and utilized the work the 7th graders completed last year, and  Yuhki followed the 8th grade curriculum focusing on the United States and democracy.  This left Mary to become the expert in the peace field, so she became the peace organizations specialist.  

Our next step was to determine specialization areas.  Although most of us submitted hand drawn pictures, Florence became the graphic artist in many instances.  Nathan and Yuhki became the technical advisors, Mary became the creative ideas and global thinking person, and Nana became the narrative writer.   

We found that the best way for us to get where we needed to be was through collaboration.  Initially we worked alone, but realized that our best work was the result of group decisions, so we began to utilize everyone's strengths.  This enabled us to help in any area if we had the knowledge to do so.  

Summary of our project

The goal of our project is to teach students worldwide the importance of world peace. One individual can change the environment that surrounds them in order to make it more peaceful, and a better place to live. As one of the questions in our peace survey states, “What are the five most important actions you can do as an individual to keep peace in your home/school environment?” We considered this question to be important in order to raise awareness of what changes an individual could bring to the world.

In our web site we have included examples of everyday people who brought great changes to the world, such as Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr.  We have also included examples of groups, such as Amnesty International and the United Nations, who try to accomplish this goal of peace.  These groups work hard every day to solve problems all over the world and try to bring world peace.

Not only do these groups work together, but countries and their governments must also work hard to keep peace between themselves and other nations. Our case studies (Japan, South Africa and the United States) zoom in on specific countries in order to see how they keep peace and what went on in their history that either achieved or dismantled  that country’s peace.

Also, we studied the system of democracy, and how our three case study countries  now have democratic governments that have arisen from important documents.  We believe that not only do individuals need to strive for peace, but governments need to take an active role in promoting world peace also.

Our computer and Internet access

1. Percentage of students using the Internet at home: 90%
2. Number of workstations with Internet access in the classroom or facility: 4 computers per classroom, 4 computer labs
3. Connection speed used in the classroom or facility: Fast
4. Number of years the classroom or facility has been connected to the Internet: 7 years

Problems we had to overcome

Most of our problems were technical problems. Our server crashed multiple times for both our co-web and our actual web site so if you wrote or edited anything, it was deleted.    We hope that this problem is fixed before our website needs to be entered for the competition! Plus, our home page was deleted once, and since we had everything linked to our home page, we lost our overall navigation structure!  We overcame all of our technical problems with the help of our technical specialists, and a lot of teaching and learning from teachers and students alike. 

Being from different grade levels, and different classes, was a major difficulty.  This meant the only time we had to work on this was during our lunchtimes, since most of us have co-curricular activities and other obligations out of school!  It has been a major commitment to work through lunchtimes, but one we felt was well worth it.

We have also tried to make our writing very similar in difficulty level! Now, this has been hard when we have two different levels of students, but the eighth graders helped the sixth graders and vice versa until we found a happy medium. 

Another major problem was to try and not show, or show very little emotion, or bias, while writing. Despite the fact that our whole project was based on our opinions of events, our group tried hard to not hurt anyone’s feelings. This was very hard because some of the events that occurred in the past were very emotional and caused distress and pain to many people, and to us while researching.  This problem has been hard to overcome, but we managed it by editing our writing over and over again to leave emotions and bias out of our work.

Our project sound bite

Our project has given us an opportunity to  produce a web site that would hopefully enable students to change their environment to create a better place to live in. We have learned that peace comes from individuals, no matter what age they are, and that we are all responsible for achieving and maintaining peace. 

ELEMENTS

How the activities and research conducted by our team members supported required coursework, curriculum requirements, and content standards

Our school's mission is to develop compassionate, inquisitive learners prepared for global responsibility.  Our theme of peace and democracy ties in with this even more than we thought it would!  Related to this are our student learning outcomes that state that our school educates students to become:

• effective communicators
• literate individuals
• critical thinkers and problem solvers
• self-directed, productive learners and
• constructive community members

We have been able to follow directly our mission statement and achieve all of our student learning outcomes!  Examples include communicating with adults beyond the school campus, the writing of our research into tour format, finding ways to utilize people's strengths, deciding how to communicate with each other when we are not in the same grade level, and working with our entire middle school and including them in our quest. 

Peace and democracy is connected to our Social Studies and Language Arts curriculums and goals. One of our goals is to achieve an understanding of societies and civilizations, both past and present, by viewing the unity and diversity of these experiences. In our case studies, and our biographies of famous figures, we have taken a look at the effects that societies or even ordinary people have on our everyday life, and how some people have changed history forever.

Also, one of our Social Studies and Language Arts objectives is to make sure that each student will demonstrate group skills and an understanding of how groups work and interact. We can definitely say, that we know that collaboration is the answer! 

Our use of information tools and technologies

While we were creating our project we used numerous technology and information tools. In order to organize our ideas, we initially used Inspiration to create a mind-map, but our best tool became the collaborative web, or co-web as we call it.   The co-web was our main means of communication.  Since we didn't meet often, we were able to communicate through writing.  Each individual had an individual page on the co-web that was accessible to everyone else, therefore, while we were working on our project, we were able to access all information and people at all times.  Most of us hadn't used a co-web before so we learned how to use this, and found it to be an incredible tool.  After the co-web was set up, we didn't use e-mail again!

We then set up our website straight off the co-web so it was all inclusive.  This meant being able to copy and paste directly onto our FrontPage web and this was very efficient.  Again, only one of us was knowledgeable about FrontPage to begin with, but now we think we have a great understanding of the program.  Both of our supervisors helped us learn the program so that we could become self-sufficient.  This enabled us to all be working on our FrontPage site independently and determine the format we wanted. 

The list of technology tools is endless!  They included PowerPoint, scanner, Apple works, Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Photo Editor, Microsoft Word, Excel, the internet to name a few.

Our information tools included most importantly...people!  We have based our research on the numerous interviews we have completed.  We wanted to ensure that people were the primary source, since we believe peace begins with individuals.  The information we gathered came from multiple sources: online encyclopedias, the internet, online catalogue at our library, non-fiction books, and our own school work.

Our group as "ambassadors" and spokespersons

Our most important goal has been to raise awareness at our school, at the individual level.  Therefore, we included our middle school students by introducing our topic to them at a community meeting, and by giving them the peace survey.  This theme of peace and tolerance is very important to us, and our project is an extension of work we have continued to do as advisories.

An important aspect has been to communicate with people with knowledge about our topic.  To this end, we contacted our local American Embassy, our local international university, and a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing.  We interviewed each person to help us with specific information that we needed.  Each time we interviewed someone, our own views changed, so we had to think our project out again! Matsubara-san, the survivor from Hiroshima, was so impressed that we wanted to continue our 7th grade work about peace, and extend it.  She was more than willing to help us in any way, and we realized then, that we can make a difference.  Five middle school students, do have the power to change things. 

To reach the world we hope that our website will be used by schools other than our own.  It became important for us to help middle school students realize that they do make a difference, so we have included a section on 'what you can do to make a difference.'  We hope that this enables students everywhere to stand up and work together for peaceful solutions. 

The impact that our project will have on our local community

After the incident of September 11th, our school has been especially conscious to achieve world peace. Our project’s goal is to raise awareness about peace, and how we can achieve and maintain it. During the time our project has taken place, we have provoked discussions concerning world peace within our school. By studying accomplishments and efforts conducted by many famous figures trying to create world peace, the readers of this site will reflect on how they, as individuals and as a part of a community, nation and society, can try to accomplish that too. Recognizing the importance of groups trying to promote and keep world peace will hopefully raise awareness and positively affect the minds of students. Students hold the key to the world's future.

How we involved helpers and volunteers

We are so thankful to everyone who helped us out here.  The list seems endless, but we will try and acknowledge everyone.  Our technical support staff were fantastic.  This was a huge project to coordinate, and most of us had not used a co-web, or had even created a web or used FrontPage before.  We are confident now using this technology and we want to thank our tech staff for not running away from us when they saw us approaching!

We want to thank the middle school students.  They supported us by giving us ideas, participating in the survey, writing poems, critiquing our web and most importantly by giving us moral support.  They have been truly wonderful and we couldn't have done this without them.

We need to thank Matsubara-san and the parents of students at ASIJ.  Without their help, we wouldn't have had the depth of information that we have.  We have been frantically emailing everyone for information, and they have all come through for us! 

We want to thank our parents for saying, "Go for it!"  All of this work has been completed on top of everything else we have in our busy lives, and believe us...we are busy!  Their positive inspiration has been incredible, and we do believe now that we hold the key.