Living Heritage -Duntroon School - Irrigation in the Duntroon Area

So how did we go about investigating our topic and creating our web pages?

For Our Inquiry:

We brainstormed water and how it is used in our local area - as 'water' was our school wide inquiry topic for Term One and Two 2007.
Once we had a huge list of all the ways we use water - we had to decided on one area to investigate further - an area we didn't really know a lot about. So we decided to look into 'irrigation'.
We thought of all the different types of irrigation. From here we considered what we needed to learn - such as; why do we need irrigation, how do we gather water, get it to farms and then apply it etc (what we needed to learn - formed our questions of inquiry). With a range of areas in mind we mind mapped what we thought we would have for links in regard to a web page and then we split into groups of two or three to work in.
As a class we then brainstormed how and where we could find the information we required - we discovered that our parents knew a lot and so we invited some parents into speak to us while Miss James also organised a fieldtrip for us (we visited three farms to learn about the types of irrigation they have, how they get their water etc. We also had a look around a local water gathering site.)
We invited two experts in to talk to us - one about the different types of water application devices (k-line, centre pivots etc) and the other to tell us about the recent development of the North Otago Irrigation Scheme.
In our groups, we wrote letters, faxed, emailed or phoned various people to clarify and gather more information in regard to our own areas of inquiry.

Once we felt we had enough information and a clear understanding of our area, we wrote our information into sentences and paragraphs. We found relevant pictures to go with the text and then we began to create our web pages and type our findings onto the computer.

When all the pages were finished and we had self checked our work - we conferenced with Miss James and then we connected our pages together using hyperlinks.

We then sat down as a class and viewed our web pages.

Learning about Front Page:

We learnt about FrontPage and how to use it, we looked at a number of Living Heritage Sites that have already been created by children at other schools. While we were busy doing this we were also considering what looked good and what we needed on a web page. By the end of the session we had created a list of what makes a good web page.
We started fiddling around with Front Page - experimenting with all the buttons and tools we had learnt about. In our groups we each created what we thought we liked for the base concepts of a web page. We shared these with the class and then voted on things such as - background colour, logo, title font and colour, text font, page layout etc. Miss James wrote the decided on criteria for each page up on a big sheet of paper - we used this regularly to guide our web page creations (because as a class we thought it was important to have a consistant visual appearance throughout our web pages)