1. Description of Our Community
The City of Oxnard is located along the California coastline between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. It is a seaside community of 160,035 people. Oxnard takes it name from the 1890's sugar beet business own by the four Oxnard brothers. It is an agricultural community, and its climate is excellent for producing fresh fruits and vegetables all year long. Portuguese sailor Juan Cabrillo called it "the land of endless summers." During the spring and summer seasons, you can smell the scent of strawberries all over Oxnard. One of the major events in our city is the Annual Strawberry Festival that takes place in May. Another major event is the Celebration of the Whales Festival. This is an eight-week schedule of activities to celebrate the migration of the Pacific Gray Whale.
2. Summary of Our Project
Students researched three big companies, one school district, and the only hospital in the city. They conducted personal interviews either in person or by email.
3. Our Computer and Internet Access
A. Percentage of students using the Internet at home:21-50%
B. Number of workstations with Internet access in the classroom:2-3
C. Connection speed used in the classroom:dedicated connection
D. Number of years our classroom has been connected to the Internet:2-3
E. Additional comments concerning your computer and/or Internet access (Optional):
Our class is located in the only building in our school that has internet access through a local LAN. We have three main stations networked and connected to the internet. There are also 21 Pentium II laptops for schoolwide use, but they are mostly used by the 4th grades.
4. Problems We Had To Overcome
The major problem we had was time. We entered the CyberFair in February. This gave us only seven weeks to work on our project. For that reason we met almost every day after school. In addition we held online sessions during some weekends using Tapped In, a virtual community of teachers and students. It was also complicated to narrow down the topic and organize the interviews. Students finally decided to investigate the five places they considered most relevant to the life of the city. Parents were very helpful by supporting their children in this project. Community members interviewed were very cooperative as well.
5. Our Project Sound Bite
Participating in the CyberFair has given these a girls a great sense of accomplishment and pride through their successful use of technological tools. They feel representing their school is a great honor, and want to continue doing it in the future.
6. How did your activities and research for this CyberFair Project support standards, required coursework and curriculum standards?
Students conducting this research used skills contained in the Rio School District Technology Plan. The following are some of the expected technology goals for 4th grade that were accomplished by the students that worked on this project: - Navigate the World Wide Web to perform search for specific information - Create publication quality documents - Import graphics within a program - Import graphics from other programs - Incorporate information from the Internet and CD-Roms This project also addressed California English/Language Arts Content Standard # 2.1: Write Narratives: " a. Relate ideas, observation, or recollections of an event or experience. b. Provide a context to enable the reader to imagine the world of the event or experience " Finally, students in this project were able to accomplish our own classroom standards for knowledge construction. They were able to create meaningful questions and used a variety of resources to find the answers. They incorporated past experiences into their research and worked cooperatively towards a common goal.