Plan Factors
1. How did your activities and research for the International Schools Cyberfair project support school standards, required coursework, and curriculum standards?
“The Rhythm of Dance Steps~The Hallmark of Blessings~The Shenjiang Culture of Luzhou” is the theme of our project. We selected the theme because Shenjiang troupes are an important part of every temple festival in Luzhou. The Shenjiang culture not only impacts the community of Luzhou, but it also plays an important role in the temple culture of Taiwan; Luzhou has the highest density of Shenjiang statues as well. All of these factors led us to study the impact of the “Shenjiang” on Luzhou. Even though we had decided to study the Luzhou Shenjiang culture, we didn’t have a complete idea yet and didn’t know which direction to start in. Therefore, we spent a lot of time discussing with the teachers about what to research. We also looked into many documents, including the Luzhou Chronicle, which introduces the traditional culture of Luzhou and the history of the Shenjiang culture. Originally, we focused on searching for data about the kinds, numbers and looks of different Luzhou Shenjiang statues, but the research seemed to only pile up our documentation and it couldn't contribute much. After a few weeks of discussion, we finally decided on the direction of the study for the significance and influence of Luzhou Shenjiang statues to Luzhou. Therefore, our study should not only introduce the kinds of Shenjiang statues Luzhou has; our focus should be on how to develop the Luzhou Shenjiang culture and how the spirit of Shenjiang has influenced the Luzhou people.We want to introduce the Luzhou Shenjiang culture to the entire Taiwan, and even the entire world.
The three instructors in the project, Director Chi-sheng Cheng, Teacher Ming-kui Tsai and Teacher Guan-you Guo, each had a different expertise and piece of work. The students played important roles in the project, as well. Without the students’ participation, the work would be meaningless and no more than just a teachers’ project. Both sides improved after constant interactions and reviews on the project. In the process, the students learned about cooperation as well as the Luzhou Shenjiang culture. The teachers’ constant reviews for the project, their interaction among students and with students, have aroused various sparks. How great is the power in unity! The students have transformed from passive learners to voluntary knowledge builders. This, which textbooks do not provide, is the spirit of the Grade 1-9 Curriculum, “Portable Knowledge”.
Domain |
Description |
Language |
Through the Cyberfair project, we learned about the process of interviews in many steps: searching for data, studying data, discussing for interviews, writing questions, and the interview format. We also learned planning and promotional skills for exhibition, and site commentary skills. We learned to spot out dilemmas to find solutions through reviews as well. We recorded the contents of activities on our blog at all times. All of the above promoted our abilities in listening, speaking, reading, writing, and organization. |
Mathematics |
For the on-line questionnaire survey in Google Docs, we analyzed the data through Excel and explained with charts, helping people to easily understand the Shenjiang culture of Luzhou. |
Various activities |
We worked together closely through the entire process. Everyone needed to be responsible for their assignments, exchange their views, and help each other to complete jobs in every stage. These trainings helped us understand the importance of unity. |
Society |
In order to help the community learn the Luzhou Shenjiang culture, besides for the exhibition held on campus, we did many off-campus activities in regards to the Shenjiang culture and introduced them to the residents. Through our activities, we saw the impact of the Shenjiang culture due to time and environmental changes. This encouraged us to contribute to the heritage of Luzhou Shenjiang culture. |
Art & Culture |
This project topic involves the art of sculpture and face painting. In order to help more people understand our project, we put up many posters on campus. We hoped viewers could understand more through these pretty posters. We also introduced the beauty of the Luzhou Shenjiang culture to classes on campus, so that the students could join us in learning about the Luzhou Shenjiang culture. |
Nature & Life technologies |
We adhered to the practice of science research when we faced problems during the process of activities. We learned to think from many perspectives and proposed effective resolutions to develop, for students, the abilities of concluding, organization, judgment, response, and creation. We used various information technologies to help with our interviews, taking photos, and taking videos; we also used various computer software to help us with photo editing (Photocap 5.1), website producing (Dreamweaver) and video production (Power Director 11). In this process, we learned how to use the newest technologies to produce our website, and enjoyed the process of the search and independent thinking. |
Health and Physical Education |
The students learned to have a positive demeanor through the process of interviews. The process of arranging activities helped students develop healthy personalities. Also, through positive thinking, students will develop a healthy mindset and prospect on life. With continuous activities and interviews, mental and physical activity is very high; we needed good energy to complete this project. |
2.What information tools & technologies did you use to complete your CyberFair project?
Equipment Used |
Description of Use |
Recording pen |
Recording interviews and writing subtitles |
Canon Digital camera |
Taking photos during activities and recording videos |
JVC Video camera |
Filming and making videos of the Shenjiang culture |
NAS Storage and flash drive |
Hard disk, thumb drives and web drives |
Printer and poster printer |
Printing information and exporting images |
Internet & EMAIL |
Data search, communicating and submitting of interview records |
Computer Software |
Dreamweaver、PowerDirector 10、Photoshop CS6、Office2013、Photocap 6.0、Xmind |
Google Docs and Wordpress blog |
Collecting data and co-writing documents with Google Docs and the Wordpress Blog set up by the school. |
1. Tools used for recording research:
During the process of research, information technologies helped to resolve many problems. For example, every time we went to visit Master Wen-chih Lin and Curator Liang-chuan Wang, we would take a pen recorder and camera with us. We did this because we could not memorize every word the interviewees said, and we would forget some things when we came back to organize the summaries or reviews. After coming back to school to organize records, the hard drives on Cloud that the school set up, such as NAS Storage, were very important; Wordpress and Google Docs, also played an important role. From the beginning of the Cyberfair project, Teacher Tsai set up the blog (http://163.20.137.72/2013cyberfair/) for us to upload our writing from home. Then, the instructor would log in to correct our typos and edit our sentences. After using it for a certain period of time, we discovered the blog function was not quite sufficient, so Teacher Tsai introduced us to the co-write function in Google Docs. This function would let 10 of us (including the instructor) work on the writing together at the same time. When the instructor was teaching us about Shenjiang, we would enter our comments and thoughts into the document, so that he would be able to see our feedback immediately. This was a great benefit to some shy classmates, since they might have been too shy to express their opinions. Therefore, there are many of our own voices shown on our webpage.
2. Tools used for promotion:
The poster printer played an important role while we were promoting our project. We needed the help of this printer for promotion announcements, class teaching, carnival activities, questionnaires and many other activities. Since everybody’s time was limited, the poster printer saved us lots of time. Therefore, we all think the printer helped us very much. We appreciate that the school provided such a tool for us to use. Also, during the video promotion, we needed to splice videos. Fortunately, the school provided us with PowerDirector Ultra 10 to use, so that we were able to produce the promotional video. Moreover, the questionnaire survey function in Google Docs helped us to do the survey, saved us a lot of printing paper, and allowed many students on campus to answer the questions quickly. We could also view the results immediately after the students filled up their questionnaires. This helped us a lot. The questionnaire results can be found on the culture transmission page of our website.
3. Tools used in creating webpages:
It was close to the end of the activities when we started to make webpages. It was also very close to the deadline of handing in our work. Most of our classmates were not familiar with making websites, and did not even know how to start. Fortunately, the instructor taught us how to make the webpages by using Dreamweaver, and to organize our website infrastructure with Xmind mental chart so that we did not mess up the links. Another problem we encountered was the transmission and editing of images. Loading images onto web pages was not as easy as what we had thought; we could not directly use any picture we took for the website. The first problem was the pictures sizes; each was different and made the webpage appear to be inconsistent. Therefore, we used Photocap to resize and edit the pictures, and to make all the pictures on the website look the same size. We used Photoshop to remove the backgrounds of pictures, so that some images could be transparent. We could not take some of the pictures, so we used a scanner to scan pictures from books, and then used Photoshop to edit the pictures and make them look better.
This is the research infrastructure we created using Xmind and is used as an important reference for website
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There were numerous tools used. We learned that it would not have been easy to complete this project without the use of many data technologies. If we are able to get familiar with the operation and application of every tool, we could more effectively use each tool, and proceed with the project more efficiently.
3. In what ways did you act as “ambassadors” and spokespersons for your Cyberfair project both on-line and in person?
The topic, Luzhou Shenjiang culture, is very special to us. Some of our members are Christians. Even though some people make the connection between Shenjiang statues and religion, we were not advertising religion. We were popularizing the Shenjiang culture and studying it more intensively. Culture-learning is the attitude our Christian students have held. We played roles as promotion ambassadors and performed in various ways. We tried hard in everything we did. For example, we collected data through a website questionnaire and advertised the video on which we introduced Shenjiang history in the 5th grade classes, room 12 and room 19, on the website of Lu Chiang Elementary School (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0Cpm0BjR6gk). In order for teachers and students on campus to learn what activity we were doing, we planned the promotion for the morning meeting of our whole school, and advertised it on the school video broadcast. We made posters to put up at school to let more people know about the Luzhou Shenjiang culture and designed feedback sheets for students to fill with their comments. We also set a booth in the club performance exhibition of the school to let students, who are interested, ask questions. Moreover, we recited a Shenjiang poem we created together in the poetry-reciting competition held by the school library.
When we started the Cyberfair project, Teacher Tsai set up a Shenjiang web blog (http://163.20.137.72/2013cyberfair/) to be a platform for our reviewing and recording. A local TV station has come to visit us in the club performance exhibition as well. Shun-wei Huang and Guan-ting He were interviewed, and the news was broadcasted through the local station. We hope more Luzhou citizens will view this, and know that Luzhou Shenjiang culture is important. We hope we can gather people’s attention by our silent contribution to Luzhou culture, so that more Luzhou people will participate in our activities. We have done a lot and the last purpose is to let people know Luzhou Shenjiang culture through various ways, and hope more students will learn about Luzhou Shenjiang culture. We want this traditional culture art to be preserved forever.
Promotion through school homepage |
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4. What has been the impact of your project on your community?
(1) Influences to us:
Since planning to participate in the Cyberfair project, we went to the computer room for training every day at noon. The instructor assigned a lot of data for us to read to understand Luzhou culture, and led us to grow up together. Moreover, Cyberfair project members needed to get together to prepare and discuss the content of activities every weekend. We also visited farther places every Saturday by walking. Our learning in this period time was very abundant and varied greatly. We went to the computer room to make webpages and edit writing content every day during our winter break. Our instructor assigned a little homework to us every day so that we could think further at home. Since we all had academic pressures, such as extra tutoring or talent and skill classes, we needed to learn time management between academics and the project. Also, the process of this project gave me the attitude of independent thinking and better learning. Our instructor led us to consider everything from several perspectives so that we would learn to analyze carefully. This is a good learning attitude we have developed in this project, and should help our academic life much in the future.
(2) Influences to the region:
5. Intellectual properties
1. Text content:
All writing content on the website was written and edited by our team members. For the interviews, we have informed interviewees of our activity content, and were approved by the interviewees before using the content. The original source or related link was listed for all the referred data on the website to protect the authors’ rights.
2. Photography:
For the photos, the ones used on the website are mostly taken or drawn by teachers or students. If not, the usage was approved or authorized by the interviewees.
6. How did other locals provide assistance or voluntarily participate in our project?
To Director Chi-sheng Cheng: We want to thank Director Cheng for his frequent sacrifices during holidays to take us out for off-campus visits. Besides for contacting interviewees before visits, he also gave us lessons on the spot. We thank him very much. Director Cheng is very busy on his duty, but still frees up his schedule to participate in project activities. He often encourages us. That’s very warm and very touching.
To Master Wen-chih Lin: Master Lin has provided the biggest help to this Cyberfair project. Besides for tirelessly answering our questions, he has shown us his work studio and made Shenjiang gods in front of us, so that we could understand the production better. Thank you very much!
To Curator Liang-chuan Wang: We want to thank Curator Wang for his enthusiasm in explaining the steps of carving Shenjiang statues and the historical origin of the gods to us. He also taught us to do things in terms of the truth and the stories behind each god. We are very thankful!
To the Art Teachers: We thank the art teachers who provided us tools and taught us painting skills, so that our Shenjiang god paintings and face paintings could be completed well. Without their help, our webpage would not have those lovely Shenjiang god paintings.
To the Class teachers: We thank the school teachers Hsiu-yen Chang, Hsin-yi Wang, Shu-hua Yeh and Li-ming Chen for cooperating with the Cyberfair project and recommending the students to participate, so that we could complete the project.
To the Computer Teachers: Since we used an online questionnaire and requested the campus students to answer them on computers, we needed the assistance of our computer teachers. We would like to thank the campus computer teachers, Teacher Tung-lin Hsieh, Chieh-chen Liu and Chieh-chang Lin, for helping us to let the 3rd through 6th graders answer the questionnaire about the Luzhou Shenjiang god culture. Without their help, we wouldn’t even know how to distribute the questionnaire and could have spent lots of money on copying papers.
To the Students’ Parents: We thank the parents of the team for supporting their children to continuously meet for the Cyberfair project, so that we were able to complete it. Parents’ support is very important. If they didn’t agree with this activity, they would not let their kids participate in all meetings, and then the project could be behind schedule. Therefore, parents’ support was the key to completing the project. We are very thankful for the parents who supported and cooperated with us.
To the Community People: When proceeding to off-campus visits, the temple abbots, such as Master Wen-chih Lin and Liang-chuan Wang, whole-heartedly hosted us. They answered our questions in good details, provided us with important information, and guided us to find information we needed. We really appreciate their help.
7. Discoveries, Lessons and Surprises
1. Discoveries:
By proceeding with the monographic study, we discovered that so much traditional culture is misunderstood or forgotten. In the trend of globalization, the strong culture dominates the culture of the countries and makes many local cultures disappear gradually. Without doing systematic records, our descendants will be completely unfamiliar with these cultures. What a pity! Through this practical experience of special investigation, we discovered that recording culture is difficult but very important, which makes us respect the people who record and carry on cultures.
2. Lessons:
3. Surprises:
The culture of “Shenjiang” in Luzhou is really a special traditional culture. It carries the wisdom of ancestors and the cultural customs. Producing Shenjiang statues require that people with different skills cooperate, but most people are not aware of these difficulties. After practical observation and interviews, we realized it actually requires profound skills. At the same time, we also discovered another meaning of “Shenjiang” – spirits of loyalty, filial piety, and integrity. This is what we should adhere to whatever we do.