Curriculum Projects
5 Steps to Cyberspace
Step 1: Find Out
Here you can see what pupils
need to do to get their work into the Millennium files and how you can help them.
Each Curriculum Project takes pupils through the same 5 basic steps.
Interviews and Field Studies
A great deal of information about life in the UK only exists in people's memories.
This project offers a wonderful opportunity to record a fascinating oral legacy from
pupils' direct conversations with people in the community. Pupils can also investigate
their home and local environments at first hand and build a picture of how we live
across the UK.
You will need to arrange
safe access to people in the community. For example it might be appropriate for pairs
of pupils to interview individual subjects in an old people's club or customers in
a Tesco store. They could interview the adults they live with at home or interviewees
could be invited to the school. You might remind pupils of the dangers of unsupervised
meetings with strangers. You might also need to arrange parental permission for out-of-school
visits.
You can use the sample
Introduction for Interviewees letter, to explain what the project is about
and what pupils need. Please adapt it to your circumstances.
Pupils' Questions
You will need to help
your pupils design their research approach, which usually includes creating questionnaires
to guide their interviews and projects.The richness of the information pupils
acquire will result from the quality of the questions they ask and the quality of
their recording and interpretation.
You might need to encourage
pupils to ask the questions that help them discover what they really want to know.
You can help them frame open-ended questions and help them consider the order of
questioning, so they build trust with their interviewees. They can test questions
on each other and refine them.
Pupils can write their
questions on copies of the Interview Template and use them to conduct and
record their interviews. They might also need advice on how to take notes, how to
use tape recorders in interviews and how take photographs to illustrate their work
that will display well on the web site.
Key Questions
Small individual
contributions from tens of thousands of young people are building into a huge bank of information on
the SchoolNet Global Web site, that they can later explore and analyse. In this
way, they will gain understanding of how we live across the UK, from the Highlands
and Islands of Scotland to the streets of London; from central Belfast to rural East
Anglia; from the mining towns of Wales to the farms of Cornwall.
To ensure that we collect
this comparative information, pupils must include all the Key Questions in their
questionnaires. Please discuss these questions with your pupils and let them test
them on each other to ensure their understanding.
SchoolNet Global 
