Our Narrative

Project narrative
Ukrainian Local Leaders

Information about our site
1. Link to our CyberFair 2005 Entry
2. Link to our Home Page
3. Date of Project: March 21, 2000
4. School:Lyceum‘Professional’
5. City: Kharkiv, Ukraine
6. Teachers or Classes: English Teacher Oxana Veremey

6. How many students worked on this project? 5
7. Their ages were: 15-17 years old
8. Project Contact Email: v-ksenya@yandex.ru
Project Overview
1. We entered our Web site in Cyber Fair Category:
Local Leaders
2. Description of "Our Community"
Our community consists of students from our lyceum and our English teacher. ‘Professional’ is a wonderful private school with friendly and warm atmosphere. The most highly qualified teachers in Kharkiv work here and they teach the most gifted students. Generally speaking lyceum is one of the best schools of our city. There are three departments: Computer School, School of Economics and School of Foreign Languages. All students who worked at this Cyber Fair Project are from Computer School!!! We had been searching for information, sorting and composing it, working out the design concept and finally brought our project to life. Our teacher watched every step of ours, she of ours was our inspirer and helper.
1. Summary of Our Project
Our project focused on leadership- past, present, and future. First we studied the concept of leadership in general using small group brainstorming sessions, reading leadership materials, and trying leadership games and activities. We interviewed several people in the street to know their attitude to the events taking place in our country and its leaders. We were in Kiev in the focus of events in the square. It was a kind of research. We used our skills to learn more about these famous leaders. We began searching for relevant information in newspapers, magazines, books and Internet. We had to discover the most interesting, eye-catching, involving and important information about our Ukrainian leaders and voting in general. But it wasn’t the informational work only At this time we were developing the design concept of our site. We tried to find the most original ideas and innovative decisions. After all we can say that it was huge and hard but very interesting, important and very useful for all of us work. We enjoyed it immensely.
2. Our Internet Access
3. Problems We Had To Overcome
The first problem we had to overcome was that there were rather few people working at this project. Our teacher wanted only the best students to be involved in all this. So there was a little competition between us.
The other problem was that we couldn’t look through all links placed in the Internet, books and newspapers; because there was so much information you even cannot imagine (we selected an extremely important but a very extensive topic) There was everything from biographies to the latest political steps of Ukrainian leaders. We had to find the most intriguing headlines and articles. Some articles had to be translated from Russian and Ukrainian into English. It took us lots of time and effort.
For some span of time we had to stay at home, because of flu epidemic and quarantine in Kharkiv. So we communicated with each other only by phone and e-mail. It was extremely difficult to make everything together in two weeks! Our teacher had to phone everyone and tell us what to do next. She fixed dates of meetings and had it all under control It was extremely difficult, but we all managed it and organized everything correctly.
There also were some problems with computers in school. We had changing from Windows 98 to Windows XP and then back to Windows 98 again.
4. Our Project Sound Bite
Cyber Fair gave us a chance to experience leadership development first hand while learning about leaders. Although our community will look to our generation to introduce and implement new technology, we look to the experience of the leaders in our community to learn the leadership skills necessary to accept this leadership challenge. Cyber Fair 2005 has been educational and fun! A big THANKS to everyone who made it possible.

Project Elements
1) How did your activities and research for this International School Cyber Fair project support your required coursework and curriculum requirements?
Lyceum’s curriculum focuses on writing as a whole. We learned how to craft meaningful and relevant interview questions and incorporate the information into writing. Next, this information was sorted, proofread, edited, reedited, and finally published. In order to accomplish this, we used MS word, Notepad (for HTML pages), digital camera, Adobe Photoshop, email, scanners, tape recorders and the Internet.The Internet for teaching and learning has been more effective than traditional methods because we are more interested, and thus more highly motivated. We feel that this has been a wonderful contribution to the community, and even the world, because now people have another way to visit Ukraine and learn about the people who live here!

2) What information tools and technologies did you use to complete your Cyber Fair project?
Traditional Technology such as telephones were used to set up appointments, arrange details. We researched famous leaders using print materials in our library. We learn to use traditional office equipment for mailings and other phases of this project

Computer technology was used throughout the project. Microsoft Access was used to create a database to compile the information. Microsoft Excel was used to keep track of financial data related to the project. Microsoft Word was used for all word processing needs and well as most desktop publishing needs. We even learned how to integrate software by creating a Word Mail Merge using data in Access. Of course we used the Internet to research the topic of leadership as well as to find information about our famous leaders. All students used to use the Microsoft Office Products as HTML files as we saved Word documents as HTML. We all became experts at using Netscape Composer and at accessing a variety of folders hierarchies and to copy and move files between folders. Some students learned advanced web techniques such as how to FTP, work with Java and other scripting languages. We also used E-mail to pass some information and to communicate with each other.

Image technology such as scanners was essential to add graphics from local resources. We learned a lot about the different graphic types and how to convert and resize files to meet our needs. Some of the members became proficient with Adobe Photo-Shop, Adobe Image Ready, and Fractal Painter. We also used a desktop projector to conference about our project at various stages of development. We evaluated the project together by projecting it on a large screen and discussing it together. This also proved invaluable in presenting our vision and our project to community groups

3) In what ways did you act as "ambassadors" and spokespersons for your Cyber Fair project both on-line and in person.
We worked together to decide what categories to have for the web project. We then decided which category we would like to be helped to create. We interviewed people for the information we needed. We showed our site to our school administration and sponsors. The students were able to share their web pages on a big screen with a video projector. The members really enjoyed the project and were very supportive of the students. Parents and the community were able to read about the project in an article, written by the Cyber Fair participants, in the school newspaper, which was distributed throughout the lyceum’s community. The article included photos from the project's home page and a web address to visit the site. The Cyber Fair home page is linked to the ‘Professional’s’ home page, so anyone visiting our home page can also see our Cyber Fair project. We have received lots of positive feedback from the local community supporting our project.
We also told a lot about our Cyber Fair project to our friends and members of their families. So we hope next year there will be more participants from our city next year.

4) What has been the impact of your project on your community?
Cyber Fair has put our community on the map. We have used Cyber Fair to develop our leadership skills. Our experience with Cyber Fair has led to the development of a full year web design class. This program has been recognized for its innovative approach to combining learning about leadership with learning about technology, it has made incredible strides in getting women involved with technology. We therefore thought that it was time to not only practice our leadership skills, but to also study leadership. It was time to take an indepth look at leadership past, present, and future.
We also feel that Cyber Fair is a great way to help girls get more involved with technology. Girls enjoy the experience of being project leaders; they enjoy seeing a project through from beginning to end; they enjoy making things look pretty. Our Cyber Fair not only gives girls an opportunity to do what they love and enjoy, but also throws them into a technical arena to make it happen. They gain confidence in their ability to use technology. Many of our Cyber Fair participants have enjoyed the project so much, that they have signed up for further technology courses.
We believe that our Cyber Fair experience contributes significantly to this. We feel that one of the main outcomes of this project was not so much in the web site itself, but the process that occurred to prepare for creating the web sites. The community members got a chance to "YOUTH IN ACTION". They got a chance to see young people making a difference. They got a chance to see the student-produced products that showcased the skills our young people were learning in our schools. The person to person contacts made by students made people more aware of the types of skills students are learning in school today. And of course, this project increases our community's awareness about the Internet and its power. We have had several community members inquire about how to publish information on the Internet and look to our students for assistance. Our students are receiving the opportunity to put their leadership skills into action as they develop partnerships with community members who want web sites designed.

5) How did your project involve other members of your community as helpers and volunteers?
Our Cyber Fair Project would not have been possible without cooperation from our local community. They let us take the time to interview them, and they encouraged up in our efforts. They were our friends, members of our families, teachers from lyceum and just people we met in the street to interview. Our programming teachers helped us to make up the design of our site, our English teachers helped us with translation and correction our mistakes.

6) Discoveries, Lessons and Surprises
One of the first discoveries was how willing people were to work with us and how much trust they had in our ability to do a good job. We also learned a lot about the dynamics of working as a group, under pressure trying to meet a deadline. We learned that we need to be more careful not to forget about people's feelings in order to get the job done. We learned that positive encouragement goes further than criticism. We learned that getting the job done, often requires OVERTIME, such as coming in on a Saturday, or working late hours, or giving up free time at school. We learned that those times are a real test of whose committed and whose not.
We also learned a lot about leadership. One of the most interesting thing we learned about leadership, is that Leadership is not just a skill found in the most visible and outspoken members of our school and community. This project helped us to find leaders in ourselves, too. We found ourselves responsible for this site and even more…for the feelings of people this site will be shown to, for their impressions will appear during watching this site. This responsibility made us think we do really important things and this project make us leaders in eyes of our site’s visitors.
An unexpected surprise was how little we knew about the famous leaders. At first it started off with just a question on our interviews--"Name a famous leader you respect." Then we realized that we had never heard of some of these people and didn't know why they were famous leaders. We soon found ourselves doing research and adding a whole section on famous leaders which was not planned in the original site. We feel this part of the project definitely helped us be more aware of a generation of leaders we knew little about.
This whole experience was one of discoveries, lessons, and even a few surprises. We learned things about ourselves, about working as a group, about technology, and about our community, past and present.