Serendipity35

Today is Blog Action Day and the theme is the environment, so I'm blogging day about my experiences with the web and the environment.

My first experience with the environment on the web was with a website contest called Thinkquest. The purpose of the competition is to have students create educational websites. The kids learn web skills and focus on a topic of interest (it's actually a giant research project in so many ways) and their site joins a library of good sites to use with other students.

I coached several teams of students with their websites back in the 1990's and they actually won a few times. It's what really got me into creating websites. The first site I ever worked on was this movie site in 1997 that took first place. The students did 99% of the web site building with the coaches just giving guidance and advice. I think my biggest contribution may have been proofreading.

A few years later, my youngest son (then in grade 6) wanted to enter with a few friends, so he got a teacher at his school to be a coach for the content and I joined as the tech guy.

They picked endangered and threatened species in New Jersey as the topic. That was kind of my prompt since they wanted to do the environment in some fashion, and I had a lot of background on the endangered program.

I have been a volunteer in NJ with the Wildlife Conservation Corps and particularly involved in the Endangered and Nongame Species Program for the past twenty years.

So we built a site using Claris Home Page and a bunch of 3.5 floppy disks that the kids would take home and bring to school. They found information, looked for similar sites, got permissions to use images, typed and ate snacks in Mrs. Ellert's classroom after school.

That site won the gold in 1999 in the Thinkquest Junior competition. The original site is still up there, but unfortunately the competition doesn't allow the team access any more and there were some errors and time sensitive things that we couldn't revise - so, I have a mirror version of Endangered New Jersey online that has those corrections.

It was a great experience for me and for the other coach (who had zero web site building experience - as I did with my first entry) and for the kids, who got a good amount of attention for the site/award, including a few environmental group awards here in NJ.

One of the features on the site was a page for teachers to ask questions and share what they were doing in their classroom with the topic. In some ways, it was a blog before we had blogs. Unfortunately, the email address on the original site is my old school address so those mails just bounce back. The mirror site has an active email and (with no promotion other than all those Google searches) it gets a few emails every month from teachers.

When the sixth graders had to explain their reason for creating the site and what "need" they felt it fulfilled, they wrote:

Our site fills a need for information on endangered species of New Jersey. The only site that has this information is a few pages on the state's site. We had their cooperation in making our site. This site gives information on each of the over 60 species by categories (mammals, reptiles, etc.) It also has pages on general topic about endangered species (causes, ways to help etc.) Since endangered species is studied in almost every elementary school in the country, we think our site will generate a lot of interest. There is information for teachers & students (a teacher page, site diary, question board etc.) We stressed content over flash and followed the concept of "Think globally, act locally."

The students (Drew, Jimmy & Brandon) are now juniors in college. Their school coach, Barbara Ann Ellert, has retired from teaching and I'm still typing characters online. And the site lives on.

Check out the library of past entries at library.thinkquest.org and consider coaching a team of your students in the 2008 Thinkquest International website competition.