This site was created for a QUT university assignment, CLB341 Language, Technology, and Education. It is designed to be a web quest – a learning aide with activities, where most or all of the information required to complete the tasks is obtained from the internet. The target audience of my web quest is teachers and students of Junior Science. Some content may be also useful for multi-strand science students, biology students, and the older primary grades. My aim was to produce a simple, elegant, easy to read, pleasant, resource, which wasn’t dry and difficult to drudge through. I chose a background colour symbolic of the topic, an elegant font for links, and an easy to read font for text.

Tackling the Task

As with designing most tasks, I decided to work backward. I asked myself the question, “What do students need to demonstrate, in order to show me they understand the concept of food webs/chains?”

I then created a food web myself, and broke it down into parts. This gave me the concepts that needed to be defined in my page. I also decided that the relationships between animals in a community (which is shown by drawing a food web) are as important as the food web itself, and went about designing a page to explain those too.

By taking the end task, and working backwards, I was able to ensure that the task would remain do-able, in that, the students would find all the definitions and examples of what they needed to know on my site.

About the Links

The links were chosen for their ability to further scaffold the tasks, and provide more information for the web quest. They were also chosen to provide more topics for assignments, and stimulate student thought on food webs, food chains and ecology.

The links were found using www.metacrawler.com and www.google.com.au, my two favourite search engines. A list of key words was compiled, based upon what I decided I needed to teach in order to scaffold the learning tasks.

A sample of my keywords in order of specificity-

• Ecology
• Eco system
• Food web
• Community
• Consumer
• Predator
• Prey
• Trophic levels
• Carnivore
• Omnivore
• Heterotroph
• Autotroph
• Producer
• Commensalism
• Competition
• Parasite
• Decomposer

My initial foray into searching was not very successful. I had to fiddle with words, and combinations of words, in order to get a specific result. I first tried searching for ecology sites, however I came up with a very broad result, including eco tourism, and conservation areas. I knew that my topic was an aspect of ecology, so I decided to combine ecology with food web.

This was much more successful, with examples of food webs among the search results. This was exactly what I needed to use, in order to decide what my site would contain. One such example: http://wow.nrri.umn.edu/wow/under/primer/page11.html

Whilst I had decided to concentrate on land examples, this was an example of the elements of food chains that I would need to discuss.

I then compiled a further list of keywords I could use to search Google and Metacrawler. I wanted a large proportion of Australian site links, so Google was a great choice for searching. Google has a radio button which indicates whether you would like to search Australian pages, or the whole web. Metacrawler required me to put Australia as one of the keywords.

About the Bookmarks

Filing the links into bookmarks was easy with Internet Explorer. I organised my bookmarks in to categories. First the master category, CLB431 with secondary folders labelled Australian food web pages, Competitors and feral animals, Detritivore, Predators, and General

About the Images

Searching for images for each section was one of the last things I did. I have a large collection of images stored on my hard drive, collected from email newsgroups, and personal photographs that are suitable for the chosen topic. I also found looking for images easy with Google and Metacrawler both giving you the option of searching images only. Having planned the rest of the site, and starting to piece it together, I then had a better idea of the images that I would need to search for, in order to complete the project. I saved my images into a folder called ‘CLB341 webpage pics’ and then copied images seperately into my front-page images folder when I decided to definately to use a particular picture. Finally, a disclaimer inviting image owners to contact me, so that I could remove or label the images with the authors name was added, out of respect to the original photographers.