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My name is Jeniffer Roth Castillo and I have talked my father Thomas Roth into coaching our group with this project.
Me and my friends are all native dominican school kids of the primary school " Nuevo Amanecer " in Higuey in the interior of the Dominican Republic.
We are all between 5 and 11 years old, nevertheless have we decided to tell all of you out there some interesting stories on our country.(with a little help from my father of course).
The pages you will find here are the results of our project, which has been started beginning of this year and we want to keep it alive as long as we find new interesting material on our country.
Let us know what you think about our work and help us keep developing with your Input !
My daughter repeatedly came to me with here idea of creating webpages about her country.
I did not believe she was serious until she kept inviting her friends from school over to our house for getting the planning of their project done
and to start looking over my shoulders for hours when I was connecting to the Internet for my work.
Can you imagine ten pairs of eyes staring at your screen, asking eager questions and hastily taking notes ?
Though Jeniffer and two more kids have had some prior experience in working with PC's and surfing the Internet, the eight remaining members of the
group had never been that close to a computer nor worked on one !
At this moment I realized what great opportunity for an educational experiment I had in front of me and so I took on the challenge !
We named our group GoDominican as we want our vistors to have a platform for asking us specific questions on our country and get some answers on this country
which is so full of wonders and surprises.
We also want to show you aspects of our country and its people we believe are not yet represented in such order or such a way on the Internet.
(and when you follow our links you will soon find out that there are thousands of pages already publishing on the Dominican Republic).
We do not claim to be perfect nor complete but as we go along we want to develop ourselves and our skills and our knowledge.
My father allowed us to use some of his older equipment and software he hardly is using any more and we started out from
compleat scratch to learn about the Internet and the tools to publish something on the Web.
Three times a week ( as of January 15th ) we presented our ideas and results to the coach who then would comment on the work
and make some suggestions or corrections.
This project is and will be a great opportunity for us to produce something real with instant results and huge projection for development.
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I hope we are able to demonstrate what kids -- even in an underdeveloped country -- make possible without the latest and most expensive equipment, (almost) without
funds ( Thank you Geocities ); just with a lot of personal and group effort and faith in oneself.
We further want to spread the knowledge about the traditions of our country and keep up our national identity !
As far as my coaching is concerend so far I have rather listened to than corrected the kids.
They seem to prefer the trial and error approach. It is also very interesting to see how all members of the group are
equally participating in this project , even when they have no computer skills; for example the youngest one, who is just
five years old is responsible for choosing the colors of all the pages you are viewing ( as well as he is responsible for
an increased consumation of my wife's chocolate chip cookies and milk ...). Others are collecting and sampling material
from printmedia, books, TV and Radio recordings etc. but in the end the group votes what content will be published on the
Web ( I cannot vote just suggest ).
What has surprised me most so far is the fact that the kids hardly are using the swift HTML editors.
They prefer the Windows notepad or the word processor and they build their code bit for bit --
especially since finding the "view document source" option of the Web Browser, they copy the code of
pages they like and integrate it in their own work.
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