We thought you might like to know what steps we followed in making this student-made website for the 1999 ThinkQuest Junior Internet competition. This web site was created by 3 sixth grade students and their 2 teacher-coaches .

12/98 - THE IDEA
One of our student members, Drew, had participated in the ThinkQuest Internet competition last year when he was in fifth grade. His team's 1998 entry was called What's In A Name and it is a web site about the origins of names. He worked with 2 students from a neighboring town in New Jersey and another student from California who he only communicated with using e-mail. Their entry was a 1998 Finalist and received several Net awards and in its first year received over 35,000 visitors! Encouraged by his success, and determined to place in the top three in 1999, he decided to try again.

12/98 - FORMING THE TEAM
First step for Drew was to find some friends who shared an interest in the Net and wanted to try to create a site. Brandon and Jimmy are friends from school and signed on. Now they needed a coach or two.

Drew's first choice was his Dad, Ken Ronkowitz, who helped with last year's entry and teaches in Livingston, NJ. Ken agreed to sign on as a coach if he could find some students at his school who would join the team AND if the boys could find a teacher in their school who would coach them too.

They approached Mrs. Barbara Ann Ellert who they had known for a number of years because of her involvement in the Cedar Grove, NJ school district's gifted & talented program and enrichment activities. She was enthusiastic about learning the process but hesitant because she knew nothing about creating web pages.

The 2 coaches met and agreed to split the coaching --- Ken would handle the technical side of page creation and Barbara would work on research & content.

The students brought home a permission slip and information sheet about ThinkQuest to their parents.

We finalized our application online.

1/98 FINDING A TOPIC

The boys ran through several ideas -the history of money, rocketry, - but none fit the team's criteria: a topic for which there was a need for a site (search engines found plenty of sites for their ideas), something really educational, something that would be fun to research, something they already knew something about...

Ken suggested endangered species because it is studied in almost all elementary schools & is popular with kids. There are many sites about it BUT there were no sites about local New Jersey species. Ken knew this because he volunteers with the state's Wildlife Conservation Corps and was only able to find a few pages on search engines including the official New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection site. There were plenty of books they could get, but would need to narrow their focus to NJ when it came to species. The boys thought it was a good idea.

Mr. Ronkowitz found a student at his school, Lauren, who said she would like to join the team and study the animals, but she knew nothing about web site construction.

1/98 RESEARCH BEGINS
Mrs. Ellert got books from the library at school. Jimmy went to the public library. Ken & Drew sorted through brochures from the state and any organizations that involved endangered species. Copies were made for team members. Everyone surfed the Net & when sites were found that looked useful, a page was printed showing the URL address & was bookmarked. Mrs. Ellert's computer was used for research. Mr. Ronkowitz's computer already had Claris Home Page loaded on it, so it became the web page builder. Drew kept an updated copy of the site on a floppy so the team could type in Mrs. Ellert's room using Netscape Composer or Word to enter information. Mr. Ronkowitz stressed that their first concern was to get CONTENT and not to worry about fonts, colors & frills.

FINDING PICTURES TO USE of the species would be easy -- getting the right to use them might not be. We first approached the state web site's webmaster and the office of Endangered and Nongame Species Program. Happily, they were enthusiastic about the project and offered their site's information and the graphics found there. Unfortunately, any photos they had were not online & were used with permissions which they could not pass on to us. We continued searching.

ORGANIZATION OF THE SITE

It was decided to split the site into 3 main areas: the species (which would be subdivided into birds, reptiles, mammals, etc.), topics about endangered species in general (definitions, causes etc.) and finally the section that the coaches would concentrate on (teacher links, citations, updates, e-mail, promotion, permissions etc.)

MEETINGS

It was decided that the team would meet twice a week. Fridays at Mrs. Ellert's room and Wednesdays at Mr. Ronkowitz's classroom. The guys and Lauren might not need to meet to work as long as everyone knew their assignments. (Driving members to the different towns was not at all practical or desired.)

Each meeting was ended with figuring out which of the 60+ species were left to research and "assignments" were handed out. Mrs. Ellert kept track on a chart of what was left to research, type & proofread. Meetings ran from 3 - 5:30 and drinks and snacks were needed (Thanks to Drew's mom, who also carpooled the team.)

Everyone used Claris Home Page to do their word-processing so that the pages could be formatted by Drew afterwards. At each meeting the team looked at what we had and made suggestions for changes. Though everyone learned something about web page construction, it was Drew's job to format the pages and his Dad's job to check them out in a browser for compatibility.

Mrs. Ellert worked on the teacher page alone. Both coaches brainstormed this diary page and Ken got to type it up.
Unfortunately, only two weeks into the project, Lauren had lost interest and decided to "quit" the team (hard to do though after the team is registered.)

PERMISSIONS

We sent out a about ten e-mail permission requests to sites we found with useful photos. We told them that we were creating an educational web site for ThinkQuest and asked if we could use any of their photos on our site. we said that we would credit the photos to them and include a link to their site on our sources page. We got a positive response from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and from two other sites. A few never answered. Two told us that they didn't have the rights to the photos themselves! And 2 others said we could not use their photos but could link to their pages if we wished.

Each time someone did research, Mrs. Ellert copied the information for our citations page - that included web sites used.

UPLOADING THE SITE

We did our first upload in February just to see how it looked & to check the links. We had problems at first. The server would not accept our files after we changed them (only new files), so we wrote to ThinkQuest about it. They wrote back that they were making some changes. After that we just checked the site offline & waited till the end of March to upload revisions and by then it worked fine.

DEADLINE TIME

The final push in late March - before baseball practices would begin & to make the 3/31 deadline. We seemed to be on schedule as far as covering the species information - our main objective - but there was a lot of proofreading and final page formatting to do. The coaches felt that this was their responsibility. Brandon went away on vacation. Drew and Jimmy typed up the last species reports but left some work for when Brandon returned home.

FINAL DAYS OF SITE CONSTRUCTION

The last week of March was a school vacation, so we put everything on Drew's home computer and worked from there on the last phases. Coach duties focused on proofreading and rechecking credits & sources. Of course, we discovered some last minute missing things... scientific names that were never typed... 2 pages that got lost because we accidentally copied an older file over them when we were transferring the site to Drew's computer... standardizing font styles & sizes... The deadline was 3/31, so of course we did our final revision uploads on... 3/31!

The very last part was PROMOTION. We e-mailed everyone we knew and told them to check out the site. We submitted the URL address to search engines like Yahoo, Lycos, InfoSeek using  .

We notified the State of New Jersey's Department of Environmental Protection about the site and hoped they will recognize our efforts and perhaps even link to our site! (They did.)

THE WAITING...

In April we were told we were a finalist.

And when the judging was over in May, we were delighted to find that our site was selected as a Gold Award Winner (that's second place) in the Science and Math category! Each of our students received $750, trophies and backpacks from ThinkQuest and their school & coaches received $1500 each.

Our promotion continues - we are contacting government officials and wildlife agencies in and out of NJ in the hopes that they will link to our site and increase our exposure.

The N.J. Department of Environmental Protection put a link on their education page to our site!

We also continue to update species information that we find or people send us and put it on the bulletin board page of this site.

In June 1999, the Cedar Grove Board of Education presented the team members with a proclamation of congratulations.

July 99 - The Newark Star-Ledger, NJ's largest newspaper, did a great feature story on the team and site including a color photo of the students under the headline "Masters of the Web."

By September 1, 1999, the team had received e-mail from teachers, students (from elementary school through college) , several biologists, and Scout leaders who had visited the site and used our resources. Frequently we receive technical questions which we try our best to answer or at least give a link or e-mail address they can try. One biologist contacted us about a species correction and was amazed to discover when we replied that the site was created by three students when they were in sixth grade - "I thought it was the state's official site! I'm very impressed!" he replied.

The site was featured on New Jersey Search and is included in their search engine database as a NJ Proud site.

November 1999 - The team presented a program along with the Conserve Wildlife Foundation at their former elementary school and received plaques of appreciation from the association for "promoting wildlife conservation awareness to the citizens of New Jersey." A photo and article was included in the Foundation's Winter 2000 newsletter.

December 1999 - The team made a slide presentation on endangered species at a local Veterans of Foreign Wars meeting. A member of the group had seen the site in a newspaper feature and contacted us. They also presented certificates of appreciation to the team members for "service to the community."

January 2000 - The site was featured in an article in the magazine New Jersey Outdoors ( page 5 of the Winter issue).