For those of you who are wondering where Norfolk Island is, we are located approximately 1000 km east of the Australian coastline, directly off the NSW/Queensland Border. Our school is a Central School, meaning we have students from Kindergarten to Year 12 (5-18yrs olds). We are an Australian Territory and students follow the NSW Department of Education and Training Syllabuses.
Firstly, we decided on the topic that we were going to do for the competition. It was a unanimous vote that we concentrate on Bounty Day, which is an historical day for Norfolk Island people.
Being a small school with about 320 students, being isolated and having limited resources, we set about negotiating with other classes for time on the computers and were able to secure 2 hours every Wednesday.
May 3rd (9 Weeks to go)
This week was spent brainstorming ways of attacking our task. This came from all different directions at once. After negotiating and deciding on the most important headings we realising that a lot of the topics were interrelated. We then split up into groups and gathered our own information.
Natasha(Bounty Ball)
Chris/Tom/Tim(History & Families)
Jayleigh/Janelle(Photos)
Shanelle/Caytie(Hymns & Food)
Lisa Q(Language)
Lisa E(Reenactment)
Shanelle/Janelle (keeping track of what we have done)
Tim/Chris/Tom (researching about creating a good web page)
May 10th (8 Weeks to go)
With eight weeks to go and the next two weeks out due to Half Yearly Exams and Work Experience, a lot of work and organisation needed to be done. Each member of the group was asked to type out the information they had found in Microsoft Word and have it ready for May 31st. This task was harder than we thought at the time, as it required us do a fair amount of work outside classtime, researching and gathering information from the School Library, Museums and all members of the community.
Today we also decided that Microsoft FrontPage 98 was going to be the software we would use for creating our web page, so a copy was ordered from Australia and we were hoping it would arrive soon.
May 17th (7 Weeks to go) – Half Yearly Exams
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May 24th (6 Weeks to go) – Work Experience
May 31st (5 Weeks to go)
Today we sat down with a printout of everything we had collected so far. Unfortunately, FrontPage hadn’t arrived yet so we couldn’t be shown how the program worked. Instead of wasting time we decided to look at layout and order; this was helped by looking at other Web pages on the Internet and deciding as a group what was effective and what wasn’t. During this process it was very difficult at times to come up with a final solution to our dilemma, as everyone had their own ideas. Finally it came down to the decision of using frames, with an index on the screen permanently so that movement through the site would be effortless.
During this week Mr Nawiesniak showed us how to use some of the technology at the school, such as the scanner and digital camera. This was very helpful, as we were now able to scan the photos that we had collected. Unfortunately, the camera is a few years old and the resolution wasn’t the best quality but it was better than nothing.
The next Tuesday was Bounty Day 1999 on Norfolk, so it was a big day for all, including having a day off school. But we had lots do, making sure that everyone knew what was required for the completion of our site.
June 7th (4 Weeks to go)
Bounty Day has come and gone. FrontPage arrived today, so once it was installed, a lesson on using it was our first priority. All the content for our pages was now in Word and the final entering of data from yesterday was completed, including the photos being scanned in, or downloaded from the camera.
It was decided today that it didn’t look like we were ever going to get the website completed on time. A solution to this problem was that we would need to work outside of classtime, and school time-which everyone did when time was available to them.
June 14th (3 Weeks to go)
Our pages have started coming together with each member of the group being responsible for a different aspect:
Tom/Chris/Jayleigh(insertion of photos into
site)
Natasha/Lisa Q/ Janelle/Shanelle (formatting)
Tim(Home Page) - and working with others as he was the most experienced at using FrontPage
Unfortunately several of our class mates were also involved in lead roles in the School's
Musical which is on in 2 weeks and were unable to be involved with some aspects of this
area.
A letter was drafted today, asking for permission from individuals to place photos and information about them on our website.
Tim has been working on our homepage using CoffeeCup Image Mapper(demo from the Internet) – a program that allows you to create a collage from photos and then each section of the collage can have a link to another page.
It was also decided that our homepage should have a counter to keep track of traffic, and instead of using the FrontPage counter, Tim downloaded a free counter from www.thecounter.com - which will allow us to keep track of, not just how many people visit our site but also which region they come from, what browser they are using and what site they have just come from.
June 22nd (2 Weeks to go)
Our site is coming along well; permission from individuals has been given and everyone is happy (almost).
After working on our Homepage we have come across a problem, and we all decided it was best to modify our layout rather than waste time. This involved changing our original layout of having a homepage without an index to incorporating one that will hopefully increase the speed of downloads, as the index won’t need to be downloaded for each page. If we have time later we will try to fix this.
Today, it was decided that it would be a nice touch to add the spoken Norfolk Language to the language page to give everyone a taste of the Native tongue. This was done by first finding a microphone and approaching a few students in the school to audition for the part. After a process of elimination Wesley, from Year 8, was chosen and the recordings began.
To improve our headings, we found a site at www.3dtextmaker.com which allowed us to create banner headings.
We approached our Norfolk Island Telecom (our ISP) this week about putting site on their server.
June 29th (1 Week to go)
Our WebPages were loaded onto our local ISP’s server today, and after a few minor adjustments which included: designing a new heading using 3dCool for the first page, as well as compressing all of our pictures using image crunchers that are found at http://www.jpegcruncher.com and http://www.gifcruncher.com. ( to speed up download time) we are all very happy with our first ever web site.
The other Students and Teachers at the school are so impressed, that it was decided that our class would tackle the Schools Web site – with the aim of getting it up and running before the end of the year. The Norfolk Island Government has also placed our site as a HOT LINK on their home page.
The experiences that we have gained through this project have been very rewarding, and we have also realised that some of our peers have many hidden talents that we can all gain from.
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