- Audience
Our expected website audience comprises four main groups. First, and most important, we hope to attract students in Grades 7 to 10 who wish to undertake our learning quest. Second, we expect to attract teachers looking for interesting online collaborative activities. We also expect to attract tourists searching the net for information about Tasmanian nature spots and good places to fish. Some of these we expect to speak English as a second or third language, so our choice of language needs to reflect that. Finally, we will be exploring the site ourselves and promoting it to our school community, including our parents and the students of feeder schools considering coming to our school.
- Purpose
We making the site as part of an English unit called Understanding Websites. We are learning by doing. There are a lot of us doing a little bit so we will not learn everything we need to know about websites this first time we study the topic, but we have observed each other and learned a lot about collaboration in groups as well as extending our computer knowledge and confidence.
- Research
We wrote about waterfalls, rivers, lakes and lagoons we knew from our family days out in the Tasmanian environment. We thank our parents for these wonderful experiences. We consulted maps and a special book which is now out of print called Atlas of Tasmania. When people brought in photos to be uploaded, if others in the class did not know where they were taken we researched their location on the map. If the students who brought them along could not tell us the exact location of the river or lake, someone else phoned that parent to ask for more information.
We also did a lot of copyright research. We contacted famous Tasmanian authors and talked to them about writing. We also wrote to their publishers and searched the net to find links to more information about them and their work.
- Design
As classes, we considered the needs of the potential audience. We voted on design such as what basic colour, where we wanted the links, and internet safety issues, eg whether to use fake names, Christian names or initials, and we discussed whether to give our grades with items submitted and decided not to.
We had many photos to choose from, but we decided to use only one per page to save download time.
We wanted to include chat, discussion, games and wordsearches we could make up - whatever anyone could make and our teacher could help us with - and planned the games in groups.
The Learning Quest taught us about copyright issues and duty of care for cybersmart students.
We hope it is user-friendly and clear but we will be prepared to adjust it once feedback comes in from our site visitors if it's not. Every image includes alt tag, so our images are accessible to those with graphics turned off. We tried to make the navigation obvious and appropriate. We discussed images, text, whitespace and multimedia and the resulting design expresses the consensus we reached. We decided not to use music because some people don't like it but there is a tiny noise on our link menu.
- Engagement
Our Learning Quest motivates students to write and publish their writing on the internet. On the Models of Excellence page we see inspiring examples of writing about our topic from professional authors. We hope our site visitors enjoy our pages. We ourselves are proud of them and we think they help us to learn in an exciting way.
- Teamwork & Collaboration
We had four main teams and lots of people working in pairs or small groups. We supported each other really well. Most people wrote something for the online descriptions sections and all the students helped each other get the typing done and helped our teacher to convert the text to hypertext. We helped each other compose the letters to authors and government departments and we helped refine our phone skills before we showed our teacher that we were ready. We enjoyed trying each others' quizzes and wordsearches and we are looking forward to seeing the pages when they are finally online.
International Learning Quest Homepage
International Year of Fresh Water Homepage
