Site Goals and Audience
Site Goals:
We had many goals when we created this site. We wanted visitors to learn about:
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Breakthroughs in telecommunications in the past and present.
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Top secret forms of communication including basic information on encryption, bugs, taps, famous ciphers, and ways for kids to send secret messages.
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Early forms of communication including carrier pigeons, town criers, smoke signals, etc.
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Forms of telecommunications that take place over wires such as the telephone, telegraph, Internet, etc.
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Wireless forms of communication such as the radio, cell phones, satellites, etc.
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Ways to communicate with people with disabilities. These pages include tips on what to do and what to say to make communication go smoothly.
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Tips on how to be a good public speaker so you won't be nervous the next time you give a speech.
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Nonverbal forms of communication such as body language.
Audience:
This site was created for children and young adults interested in communication. There is information about the history of communication, present day forms of communication, and the future of communication. We also included games, quizzes, and activities for people who learn better through those types of media. We hope there's something for everyone.
We're an international
team of students from Roosevelt School in Wauwatosa,
Wisconsin, U.S.A.
and from Glenfield Intermediate School in Auckland, New
Zealand. We chose to create this website about the history of
communication and modern day methods of communication because we were
curious about this topic. We wanted to share our knowledge with
students in other countries.
One of the best parts about creating this site was collaborating with each other through working together, email, and telephone conversations between our countries. We didn't just want to focus on communication in the United States; we wanted to include forms of communication found in other countries. It really helped that we had teammates from two different countries, because that brought two different culture's viewpoints into the creation of this site. That impacted our site content because there was information about communication that the US teammates didn't know and things our teammate from New Zealand didn't know. Here's an example, Maggie (from the US) and Caitlin (from New Zealand) created a web page together on the postal system. Putting together their ideas made the page much more interesting and more international. None of the teammates from the US had ever heard of 'posties' delivering mail on bicycles because in the US the people who deliver the mail are called 'mail carriers' and they usually walk or drive trucks.
We collaborated when we created this site by working together and by dividing up some of the jobs. Everyone wrote reports and did their own research and writing. Each person then created their own web pages except for Caitlin. Because she was in New Zealand, her teammates from the US turned her reports into web pages since she didn't have the right programs. Our team chose to divide up some of the work because different team members were better at certain things or because some teammates were more interested in certain things. For example, Jordy loves artwork so she created all the banners at the top of the pages and did a lot of the site design work. She drew the banners, scanned them, and used PhotoShop to color them and turn them into web images. Maggie likes to create activities so she created the crossword puzzles. Clayton and Maggie loved the information about top secret messages so they created most of pages found on the Top Secret page. Beau and Keegan were interested in early forms of communication and in wireless communication so they wrote many of those pages. We all worked together to help each other find information, create the activities, check links, and check each other's pages for errors.
We also faced many challenges when creating this site. Only one group member had ever created a web page when we got started in October of 2004. The rest of us had to learn to use a web editor in order to create our site. It took us a long time, and it was difficult at first. Because of that, we needed to help each other a lot. For example, if someone forgot how to insert a graphic, another teammate would help them. If someone had trouble creating a hyperlink, there was always someone to help. We also read each other's pages, looked for errors, and shared ideas. By the time we finished in April of 2005 we were web wizards! The computer, research, and writing skills that we learned through creating this site will help us throughout our school careers.
Citation
Copyrighted image of globe from "Microsoft Office Online" <http://office.microsoft.com/clipart/default.aspx?lc=en-us&cag=1> (October-March, 2004-2005). Clip art available only to licensed users for non-commercial purposes.