Audience

This site was created by a group of children (ages 9-11) for kids between the ages of 8-16. It is meant for anyone interested in learning about biodiversity and how they can help to protect it. Kids interested in nature, plants, animals, endangered species, conservation, etc. will all love this website!

We used a variety of media to capture the attention of student audiences throughout this site. We have storybook biographies about each of our site mascots that combine facts about endangered species and biodiversity with an adventurous storyline. To show we are not all talk, and that we do believe in action, we also visited a nature center and helped to remove invasive species. For kids who like listening to information, we have movie clips from an expert naturalist. We believe teachers will also think these movie clips are informative and show them to students at their schools. We also have games all about biodiversity for kids who learn better using that media.

We made the Biodiversity Basics Page to explain why biodiversity is such a big deal. We have pages about conservation and ecology to further explain and teach student audiences more about biodiversity.

The Biodiversity Threats Page were created to talk about the many reasons for the loss of plant and animal biodiversity around our planet. You can learn about how people have over-fished, over-hunted, destroyed habitats, and used harmful chemicals to harm biodiversity.

On the Biodiversity Spotlight Page, we wanted to shine a spotlight on some of the places and animals that need our help. You can learn about plants and animals that are endangered or at risk of becoming extinct. We also have pages about biomes and hotspots so you can learn more.

Out of all of the pages, the Take Action Pages are the most important. They explain how you can help save biodiversity around the world. You can help by volunteering like we did. You can also help by having a BioBlitz in your neighborhood, joining an organization, or even eating certain types of foods!

On our marvelous Activities Page, we created some of the world's best games about biodiversity! By playing games you can test your knowledge of biodiversity. Playing games to learn! We have five games, and each is about a different topic. For example, the biodiversity crossword puzzle is challenging yet exciting.

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Goals

Our goal is to help kids around the world understand what biodiversity is and why they should protect it. We chose this topic because of its global importance, and because we are very concerned about the loss of biodiversity on our planet. As we searched the web, we only found one site for kids on this topic, so we knew we were onto something that others would find useful.

We want people who visit our site to understand the following information:

• What biodiversity is all about
• The benefits of biodiversity
• How conservation and ecology protect biodiversity
• The numerous threats to biodiversity
• Biodiversity found in biomes and hotspots
• Endangered species
• Ways to take action and get involved

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Collaboration

The word collaboration means working with people in order to achieve a goal. To build this website, our team put in a huge amount of effort to reach our goal of helping to protect earth's biodiversity. We didn’t build this site for the awards or popularity. We made it because we wanted to learn and do something helpful for the world. This was our attitude from the very beginning. Creating the site was a team effort and every member of the team used his/her imagination to create and design the site.

Making our website wasn’t easy but by working in a team we were able to help each other, and it also made it a lot more fun. In the beginning, we looked at topics for the website. We narrowed it down to a few topics and chose the one that we thought was one of the most important global issues that we could do something about.

Only one of us had any knowledge about building websites. We worked together to brainstorm topics, create a site map on paper, and then we divided up the work. We had to work together to complete tasks on time and with efficiency. Using Dreamweaver and Photoshop were really hard at first. We struggled and kept trying until we got the hang of it. We took turns in a lot of different roles. Some of us were editors, and some made the buttons, backgrounds and banners. We helped each other to get everything done.

Without our coaches and teamwork, we would have never finished the whole project. The website started to take shape after months of slow but steady progress.

Don’t think that we didn’t have any hardships. We lost two team members along the way including one from India. There were times when we felt we would never finish the website. We constantly faced the deadlines that we had to complete. We also had technical difficulties. For example, the flash banner on top of the main page wouldn’t come up. It showed the names of the mascots, but the pictures of the mascots didn’t show up. Finally, we figured out how to fix it. We also noticed we didn’t have a link to the Citations Page on any of our pages! So we had to open every page and add a link. These are just a few examples of how our team collaborated in order to accomplish what we wanted to do.

We also learned a great deal by helping to remove invasive species during a field trip to the Audubon Nature Center. We worked together to chop, saw and tear down buckthorn trees.

We made the website so we could learn, and so we did. We learned a great deal about biodiversity and our home, the earth. We learned by researching, interviewing a land steward and community members, reading, and writing about what we learned. What we learned is the foundation of the website, like air is to the atmosphere.

So by building this website, we made a difference. We collaborated, struggled, hoped, and we did everything we could to bring this site to life. This website is what we did, what we learned and what we created. 

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Diversity

Our team members have multiple cultural backgrounds. We are Chinese, German, Swedish, Norwegian, Irish and more. We used our cultural backgrounds to explore biodiversity from around the globe. On our Spotlight's Page one section focuses on biomes. We added this section to our site to make sure that we wrote about biodiversity on every continent on the globe. We also have a section on Biodiversity Hotspots found in many different regions of the world. We hope that this diversity will attract different cultural groups.

Here's another example of how we used our diversity in other parts of the site. One of our group members is Chinese. He created pages about biodiversity in Asia and China. For example, he wrote about the biodiversity hotspot Mountains of Southwest China. He also wrote about the endangered giant panda and interviewed his father, who lived in China, for important information.

Other team members are from different ethnic backgrounds. They used their diversity by making sure they wrote about hotspots on as many different continents as possible. We were able to include hotspots from Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the Himalayas, and Africa. We all had different ideas about topics and places, which made us even more diverse.

We also explored and included biodiversity information from our own geographical area of Wisconsin, U.S.A. We explored the biodiversity of our local area in a service learning project in which we got rid of non-native plants in our area.

The diversity of our team helped create our site. This website wouldn't include information from all over the globe without our team’s cultural diversity.

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