• School: Elanora Heights Primary School
  District: Elanora Heights 2101
  City: Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

• Teachers or Classes:

  This project is a little different in that, it is not only our school that is represented here. Our own children prepared material on the Hawkesbury River and Narrabeen Lakes. All 425 children have been involved in the project in one way or another even though only some of them have writing or artwork named on the pages.
  We have enabled more than 50 other schools around the world to publish information about their local river or lake on our web site. This was all done via Email as many of the schools who have participated have only limited or no access to Internet. The Email contact was often a parent or teacher from the school who had an Internet account.
  We have presented on our pages the information that was Emailed to us and, after converting their material to HTML format have sent those schools their completed web pages for them to add to their own existing or future Web sites.

• How many students worked on this project?

  425 children from our own school.
  Their ages were: 4-12 years of age
  
  Plus more than 1000 children from 50 other schools in 20 other countries.

• The following people helped us,

  Click here to see : -
  1. International helpers - teachers in the various schools.
     
  2. Other helpers - e.g. librarian.
     
     

• Project Contact Email:

  Judith Bennett

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1. How did your activities and research for this International School CyberFair 96 project support your required coursework and curriculum requirements?

• Coursework

  Each term our school adopts a whole school theme around which teachers can link their work in all subject areas if they wish. Teachers are free to have other themes during the term as well. This term our whole school theme was "Rivers and Lakes". The Internet project was designed to widen the scope of the theme for all the children in our school as well as contributing to the work of teachers in other schools.
  • Many aspects of technology were used in conjunction with this project and they are listed under question 2.
  • 3rd Grade learned how to do a BUGWATCH count to determine the quality of water in a stream.
  • Science classes conducted experiments on properties of water.
  • Children designed and built boats of various sorts that had been mentioned in river and lake reports and tested them in paddling pools of water.
  • Children tested various loads on their cargo boats weighing and comparing the loads they could carry.
  • Children designed and built models of items mentioned in various river and lake reports from around the world - e.g. castles, lift-up bridges, locks.
  • Children designed and built bridges from junk materials, blocks and construction sets.
  • Children designed and built working models from Capsella (a construction set that lets children see how gears transmit the energy from the battery to the wheels or propellers).
  • Children followed the course of the stormwater drain through our school and found out how it ended up in the lake and thence to the sea.
  • Children have prepared posters to advertise ways of saving water.
  • Children have designed posters to warn about dangers of diving into rivers and lakes.
  • Children have researched related themes e.g. trade using rivers, important people that have been involved with rivers and lakes.
  
  

• Wonderful and exciting discoveries.

  • Firstly, that there are wonderful, friendly, dedicated teachers working in schools all over the world and that these people can make jokes and communicate and work together co-operatively even when coping with a limited command of English.
  • Secondly, that most of the teachers involved in this project are relatively new to Internet - as I am (school account opened November 1995). Several of them have had their link for less than 3 months. These teachers have often had to cope with severe technical challenges in getting the information and graphics transmitted to Australia successfully but have persevered! We are all learning together and I have received LOTS of technical help that I deeply appreciate from teachers in the project who are ahead of me. I really appreciate Ludger Humbert of Hagen, Germany, who told me that this Cyberfair was on and suggested that I make this project an entry in the fair.
  • Thirdly, the children have made friends with children all around the world that they can communicate with on Internet. These links have been formed and with a our school taking a theme of "Communications" for next term will be developed further.

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Technology the children used :

• All children from 2nd to 6th were involved in wordprocessing tasks using Works related to the Rivers and Lakes project.
• All children from Kindergarten to 6th Grade were involved in creating graphics on the computers many of which were selected to go on the Internet pages.
• 5th grade children created animations using ANIMATOR depicting aspects of water pollution. They have learned to record sound into the computer.
• All children became familiar with viewing Internet pages and many have had turns to use Netscape themselves because we have netscape running across the school network accessing WWW pages that I have taken off and stored on our fileserver.
• Pairs of 3rd grade children have gone to each class to demonstrate to teachers how to use Netscape on their classroom computers.
• The scanner arrived in mid-March and already there are children in each class that know how to use it to transfer photographs to the computer.
• Children used a video machine to show the video from Bangkok about their lake.
• Children used the phone to get information from the local council about Narrabeen Lake and from the Police at Wiseman's ferry about the number of cars that can go on the car ferry.
• Children used the fax machine to send questions to Hawkesbury Council.
• Many children have become familiar with using Netscape and Internet at home to demonstrate their work to family and friends.

Software we used

• Windows - usually with 4 or 5 applications running at once.
• Netscape
• Winsock
• Pegasus Mail
• FTP
• Telnet
• Microsoft Works - all the children typed their texts into Works.
• Animator - Children used this mostly to create drawings for Internet as it makes .gif files.
• Windows Paintbrush - Our diskless workstations cannot run Animator so some children used Paintbrush.
• Paintshop Pro - this utility allowed me to convert .tif, Bmp, and PCX files to .gif and JPG files, resize graphics, find their dimensions, touch up colours, connect to the scanner and read photographs, crop or cut from graphics.
• HOTDOG - this was a great learning tool but by the time the free trial period was over I could cope with using just Microsoft Works for writing HTML. It is more time consuming but we have a very limited budget.

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• We published in our school newsletter information about the project and about the fact that we were entered in the Cyberfair competition. The response has been most enthusiastic - families who have Internet are inviting their friends and neighbours in to see the work their children are doing.
• Parents with Internet at their places of work have brought up our project to show their workmates.
• We have invited a local newspaper to run an article on it later in March.
• The Gesamtschule Haspe in Hagen have had press coverage of their involvement in this project.
  Click here to read about it.
• It was the Internet project that inspired William Crendal to offer his time to allow children to be involved with a programmer in building an animated, interactive program.

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5. How did your project involve other members of your community as helpers and volunteers?

We were fortunate to have a number of people to help us complete this project.
During December and January I wrote letters to about 300 or 400 schools around the world and was delighted to have 50 of them accept the invitation to join this project.
The first 100 - 150 letters were written when I was using the school's 2400 baud modem and before I had learned HTML and created the Web pages. It was much easier to write letters and invitations after I had my own fast modem, could read WWW pages to see what was involved and had created a web site with the project started on it.
Early in January the project was advertised on the UK schools list but, as this was before we had a web site to explain the project, this elicited very few replies. The parents and teachers who did reply, have enriched the project greatly with their contributions.
It was the fact that the project was listed with the Netscape search engine that allowed the River Basin News editor, Lance Lloyd, to find us.
The Web66 list of International Schools on the Web was the key to my finding the schools that have participated in this project. This Web66 list has also been the way in which a few teachers have found our school and then our project and have enrolled and participated.

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6. What other things have you done at your school to "Share and Unite" with your community?

• Our community comprises the teachers and schools around the world who are interested in the environment of their rivers and lakes.
• Our students have established links with the students in a number of the schools who have been involved in the project and, through these keypal activities are feeling as if they are "world citizens" now.
• Teachers like Matti Simonaho of the Swedish-Finnish School in Sweden and Ludger Humbert of the Gesamtschule Haspe, Hagen in Germany have given me helpful advice about the software to use and tips for using graphics.
• Because of the links we have forged in the preparation of this project, our school is being enriched by visitors from overseas.
  • A teacher from Seattle has visited
  • 2 student teachers from Canada have arranged to come and work here.
  • A student teacher from the UK is coming to work here in June.
  • A Swedish teacher is coming here at the end of March.
  • A headmaster in Canada is arranging for some Canadian football players to visit us in June!
  • One of our students has arranged to go with her parents in June to visit a school in the USA where our 3rd Graders have keypals.
  These experiences literally bring the world to our doorstep and help our children to know they are citizens of the world.
• Hazel Gordon of the Chisholm Primary School in Canberra, Australia gave lots of helpful hints to get me started in "surfing the web".
• In turn, I have been able to help a number of teachers who are trying to get started with their own web sites. All schools who contributed to our Rivers and Lakes project are being given a copy of the HTML pages for their own river and/or lake together with the graphics of the pages they worked on to add to their own existing or future web sites.
• The Cyberfair organisers told us of two sites that had completed their Cyberfair Summary pages. One was Xavier College in Albury, New South Wales. We have now established a link with their college - their students have presented a page on the Hume Dam near Albury which is part of the Murray River. We have their permission to put a link from the Murray River report to their Hume Dam page and in turn they have put a link from their Hume Dam page to our Murray River report.
  In addition to that they have told us of two interesting Websites in Albury - the water treatment system and the Sewage works each of which are influencing the quality of the Murray River water and we were able to tell them of some Websites in Victoria to do with water quality.
  

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Computer Co-ordinator : Judith Bennett : This page was last modified 19th Jan, 1998