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This project was not the usual type
of project you might find a group of fifth grade
students doing. It didn't involve extensive
background knowledge on the subject itself and it
didn't involve long hours at the public library
looking for supporting evidence. We don't have
"wheels" to get around to do what that would
involve. But it did involve first hand research
skills.That we know about. We do have the ability
to use technology. We explored our history and
never left the comfort of our homes. We were going
to bring the war experience to anyone who visits
our site. Here's how we did it.
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We were going to bring the
war experience to anyone who visited our
site.
Here's how we did
it.
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Once we decided that we were going
to find out what the war meant to our own families,
we had to set up interviews, if possible. Caitlin,
Kaycie, Mathew, and Ben collected audio tapes,
e-mail messages, and telephone conversations. We
collected pictures, old and new, of our relatives
and collected newspaper clippings, journals, and
letters with permission from our families. All of
these had to be digitized to be uploaded onto the
site.
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The
software program we used to create this site was
Claris Home Page (FileMaker).
We used GraphicConverter (shareware)
to work with the graphics you will see. We used
SoundApp and
SoundEffects to digitize
and translate the sounds. Graphic special effects
were done using Photoshop
(Adobe).
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Next we needed to determine the
look we wanted to create. Matthew's great, great
uncle's scrapbook gave us the idea of making our
pages look bound together. We each wanted our own
look, but we knew we needed to be uniform. We kept
the same style and chose different background
colors to suit our stories. Now we were ready to
type in our thoughts and our family memories. Once
we had done this, we had to decide where best to
place each of the items we had collected in order
to make our story interactive and more
personal.
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Matthew's great, great
uncle's scrapbook
gave us the idea of making our pages look
bound together.
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We
had to link our sounds, scanned images and web
sites to our stories and then link our stories to
our home page, and to Kenneth's links page. Oh
yeah, all this time, Kenneth is surfing the net to
find good links for you to go to, in case you
wanted to know more about some of the things we
were talking about. He spent many hours using
search engines and keywords to find what we needed.
We hope you like them.
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Then we had to test, test,
test.
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Then we had to test, test, test. We
had to make sure our links would work. Could we get
to all of the pages we wanted to? Did we have
current web sites to link to, and would our
thumbnail pictures link to enlargements of the same
picture like we meant them to. The answer, as you
can see, is YES!
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