Award
2009 12 and Under: 1st place
Team
EllenRoosevelt School, WI, United States
DanielRoosevelt School, WI, United States
BenRoosevelt School, WI, United States
JacksonRoosevelt School, WI, United States
EddieRoosevelt School, WI, United States
Age Range
12 & under
Coaches
Jeremy WendlingRoosevelt School, WI, United States
Jeanne PaulusRoosevelt School, WI, United States
Category
Science & Technology > Life Science > Ecology
Audience
Ages 9 and up
Language
English
Site Features
Online Activity / Game
Quiz
Teacher Resources (Lesson Plans, Worksheets)
Video / Sound
Team Collaboration
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 made this site because we wanted to learn and do something helpful for the world.
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.
Only one of us had any knowledge of how to build a website. 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 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 service learning project to our local 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 naturalist and community members, reading, and writing about what we learned. What we learned is the foundation of the website. 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.
Team 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 Spotlights 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 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 South West 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, 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 area in our service 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.
