We are presenting our project on Wednesday and I am so ready. Karina and I found a really interesting case that we investigated and we have worked really hard to create this site this past semester. As in terms of our contract, I believe that we followed through on almost all of the goals we lined up in our contract back in March.
We have all the main pages that we wanted on our site with a few tweaks here and there. The main thing that we did not do was talk about the case from the late 1960s in Hanover County, Virginia. We decided that it would be easier and more conducive to talk about more recent cases because the reasons why it is banned/challenged have changed so much. From that idea we created the page, “Other Recent Challenges” with the StoryMap labeling the other challenges in recent years.
The Timeline and StoryMap is set up just like we wanted them to be. I think that the Timeline looks great on the first page and it ties the whole site together. We found some great images from Wikimedia Commons and tried to have at least one on each page. Our theme worked out really well and with a lot of tweaking, we created a clean looking, but colorful site. For a ton of little things, like how to adjust the font color on the top menu bar, I went to our Digital Knowledge Center for help. With their expertise, I was about to create the beautiful site we have now.
We used a ton of digital tools. I myself used both JS Timeline, iMovie, GarageBand, Canva, and Youtube to display our media. I also found images on Wikimedia Commons. I wish that we had been able to take images from the Accomack County site or some more materials that were primary resources, but I think it ended up working out well with the images that were created using Canva and the ones I found on Wikimedia Commons.
As for our timeline in which we wanted to get certain work done by, we met all of our time goals. Sometimes we even got them done sooner. We also added some information after we created the contract, like the interview with Dr. Gary Richards, so I had to fit that in. There were a couple pieces of materials that we were not able to get. We thought we were going to get a response from Charles Knitter when we sent him out interview questions, but never did. That was going to be a part of the protest page, but because we did not hear back from him we combined the two pages we initially created “Petition” and “Protest,” into one page. Because we did hear back from Sadye Saunders and she was a part of the protest anyways, we thought that it was fitting that the pages be meshed together. That was the very last thing that we revised on our site. The other thing that I tried for a couple weeks to get was the complaint form, but was unfortunately shut down by someone at the School Board office they could never give it to us because it displays personal information and told that they don’t even know where the document went.
Overall, we did really well meeting our goals that we laid out in this contract. The interview with Charles Knitter and the not being able to get the complaint form was out of our control. I am really proud of this site and excited to get the chance to present it on Wednesday for everyone.
Thank you for such an awesome course Dr. Dierking and Dr. Hajo! It was a wonderful experience.