Teacher's Comments

Noriaki Takami
Ikaruga elementary school of Taishi town

In participating in the "Harima local history by Kids", twenty pupils from our computer club and I had repeated talks over what kind of information we would present. Then we decided we would make a homepage about history of Taishi town. Our town is historically associated with Prince Regent Shotoku Taishi, and local people have faith to Shotoku Taishi. The kids are also familiar with historical spots such as the three-storied pagoda of the Ikaruga Temple. With six graders being the main producers, we tried to introduce historic sites of Taishi town by taking digital photos, making clickable maps, and putting them into our homepage.

For the kids, using digital cameras was their first experience, but they soon got skilled since the cameras were easy to use. We felt easy because we could make sure if we got right images just after taking photos and we could redo pictures again and again until we thought we got good ones. Teachers provided support in processing images and producing the homepage.

For us, this experience of being presenters of information as opposed to receivers was important because it helped the kids change the way they behave; from passive to active, from negative to positive, and from uniform to diverse.

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