OUR TEAM
Our team was made up of six persons who love horses. Our team got along well.We respected each other’s opinions and helped each other along the way.We used our strengths to complete the project. Lalita and Maddy knew a lot about horses.They provided us with information about caring for horses, tack and riding. Julia was the most organized. She guided us, edited a lot of work and did research on topics we were not familiar with such as racing and slaughter. Bella was our artist. This was important because we wanted our site to have original work such as entry pictures and digital stories. Emily was the main and enjoys working on a computer. We faced some challenges. At the beginning our group was small because people were not interested in our topic. But then Maddy found Ansley, whose sister rides horses for therapy. We needed an artist so we asked Bella. Finally, Lalita joined us. She grew up on the horse farm and has seven horses. We also faced personal challenges. In the middle of our project Ansley’s dad was transferred from Florida to Montreal, Canada. She left for Montreal during the project and continued to work using Thinkquest Projects. Julia’s challenge was lack of Internet access. She travels between her mom’s house and her dad’s house since they are divorced. Since her dad does not have Internet at his house whenever she was there she couldn’t get on the Internet. This was a challenge since so much research and communication is done online. Madison’s challenge was the first time doing Thinkquest. It was really hard for her because she did not recognize how serious it was. When she began learning about the sad stories about horses she realized that it is important to work hard and concentrate. Bella had a unique challenge because she has difficulties with her language. This sometimes causes her problems in classes. She has trouble expressing what she wants to say. Therefore, sometimes it was hard to get directions and finish all the work. Emily is involved in so many extracurricular activities that she had trouble finding time to work on Thinkquest. Most of this project was done outside class, so finding time for all this work was an issue. Finally, Lalita joined a team later than others. That is always a challenge because the team already knows each other and has learned to work together. She had to write in English which is not her native tongue. We overcame our challenges with teamwork. We used Thinkquest Projects to communicate. For example, we could write an essay, post it on Thinkquest Project and someone else could edit it. Thinkquest projects helped us and communicate with our coach from Australia. We could brainstorm and vote on our choices.We worked a lot, faced challenges, became good friends and became active in community. While we were looking forward to finishing this project, we now find it sad because we truly loved working together and making difference.
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DIVERSITY
Diversity played an important role in making our site. The first difference that we had was the way we were brought up. Some of us grew up on farms and around horses. Other’s had almost no contact or knowledge about horses. That influenced how they felt about the importance of this subject as well as the topic we chose. For example, Maddy and Lalita already knew a lot about horses and had definite ideas about how to treat horses and why are they important to people. Bella is originally from Guatemala and her parents make sure that she has a lot of knowledge of that culture. She knew horses were important because in Guatemala they are still used for transportation and work. On the other hand, Julia grew up in the city and did not see how horse issues are important to all of us. Therefore, working on this project gave her a new view. In addition, people who grew up in rural areas had more understanding of the role horses still play in our lives. This helped all of us to create a site that shows respect for horses. While we were creating our site we also came across some cultural differences. Our team currently lives in four different countries – Croatia, Canada, US and Australia. This became important as we discovered some serious issues horses face such as slaughter of horses. We realized how cultural differences can make people disagree. For example, in Canada slaughterhouses are legal. In US they are not! Many people in US and Australia cannot even think about the idea of eating horse meat. But in the other parts of the world this is as common as eating chicken. The part of the site in which we discuss slaughter was the hardest one for us because we realized that our opinions come from our cultural beliefs. We had to rewrite and discuss this part a lot until we felt that we are giving information from all sides and that we presented information fairly and with respect for different cultural beliefs. Team living in four countries was a communication challenge. This is because time difference as well as the fact we had to write a lot and wait for other to respond. Also, some of us have lesser access to Internet and that was an issue especially toward the end. This project was a great experience. We learned to be respectful of other cultures by exploring topic in which cultures have different traditions and opinions. We also learned to communicate using digital tools because we live in different places. Finally, we used the experiences we had in our lives to help our team learn and create a website.
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