Interactive Native Garden Website

Objective: Students will be redesigning a native garden school website to promote community involvement as well as how the school and community members are connected. The topic of the school website could change depending on what you feel will help connect your community with your school.

Investigate:
1. Students will brainstorm as a class the the necessary pages that should be included in the native garden website. This will include a review of the current school garden website, and a review of other garden websites that might give us ideas for design as well as information to include.
2. Possible (specialty) pages could include: community volunteers, donators, school year/summer schedule of events, native garden club, native garden shrubs, native garden trees, native garden wildflowers, non-native species, invasive species, animals of the garden, active participating teachers, tools/material available and wish list, classroom lessons/activities, and garden people (who comes to visit), contact page, teacher calendar sign-up, other?

Plan:
1. As a class, students will decide on a list of the design elements that must be included on each page, and the information that should be included as well, to keep the website cohesive, clean, and easy to maneuver through.
2. Students will work with a partner as the specialists of one particular page to plan and create for the Native Garden Website.
3. Students will be given a planning worksheet to decide the following: description of pictures to be taken and included on page, person(s) to interview for their page (ie. neighbor that lives across the street from the garden might have some insight as to who visits, how they have enjoyed it themselves, or what they would like to see happen in the garden), topic for podcast, informational text to include on page, websites to use as other informational links, navigational buttons needed to accurately move through the website.
4. Students will also be word processing a daily journal that will include their progress in the project.

Create:
Students will work with their partner to do the following:
1. Take digital pictures that could be transformed into a slideshow pertaining to their page topic (ie. native trees: students take pictures of the trees in the garden).
2. Edit and enhance pictures for quality viewing on the webpage.
3. Interview(s) regarding topic of their page to be transformed into a podcast and will be added to their page.
4. Research done via the internet will be completed by way of carefully choosing websites following a quality webpage criteria sheet. Students will include in their own words, detailed information that educates viewers about their page topic.
5. Students will include a list of websites used for their information using correct bibliographical formatting.
6. Students will include design elements decided by the class including navigation buttons and organization to build their page for the Native Garden Website.

Evaluate:
Each student will be evaluated based on the following-
1. Turn in a completed planning worksheet for their page
2. Journal of daily progress
3. Completed quality control webpage criteria sheet
4. Completed page for the native garden website with required elements
5. Present your page to the class.