On a website, you should think about your home page as the introduction paragraph of your essay.  However, we are building a website, not writing an essay.  That means that to make your writing as effective as possible, you'll need to write for your new format.

Forget the official format of an introductory paragraph and instead think about the purpose of an introductory paragraph.  In my thinking, you include an introduction in an essay for two main purposes:

• to hook your reader and 
  
• to introduce your topic

How can you grab your reader's attention quickly with a website?  What tools do you have available to you?  How can you use:

• words 
  
• pictures  
  
• links
  
• video 
  
• color
  
• design 

...to catch your reader's attention and get them interested in your topic from the very beginning?

Here's one example I found: The Water Project website.  

What do you notice about their website?  How do they grab your attention?

1.  Copy and Paste the colors to show me your progress.
2.  Don't make any changes other than the color of your own row.
3.  Update daily.

Access the Progress Tracker here.

Parents, this would be a great place for you to check in on your child and see how they think they are doing on their project.  Also, check with your child and ask to see their website and gathered information so far.

A good way to see all of the resources and expectations about your website project is to click "la" under the categories section on the right column.  It will bring up only Language Arts posts, which recently consist only of persuasive website items and short story items.

Some recent posts that might be good to view again are:
Persuasive Website Expectations
Gathering Information Sheet
How to Search the Internet
How to Find Reliable Resources
How to Find Legal Images
Example Websites

Atheism vs. Christianity
-  Equivalent of 6-10 paragraphs of original writing
-  Charts, video, images, links, and pages

Animals Need to be Adopted
-  11 paragraphs of original writing spread over 4 different pages
-  Charts, video, images, links, and pages

The Falseness of Evolution
-  9 paragraphs spread over 5 different topics that support the claim
-  Images, Links

Pro-Life Saves Lives
-  10 topics
-  A HUGE number of original paragraphs
-  Lists that organize information clearly
-  Links, Video, Very Clear Info


All sites use our standard password.

Watch the video below to learn why you can't use any image you find on the internet.  

Images you can use for sure can be found under something called the "creative commons" licence.  You can find a link to the creative commons search engine on the "Helpful Tools" page under "Search Tools".

This next week, we will be planning out the layout of the books we are publishing.  To be honest, it is way more confusing and labor-intensive than it should be, so this should be good practice at being patient.

I'll explain everything in class and also hand out this from in class, but if you lose it or want a preview of what's going to happen you can check out this Book Layout Planner.

We've had a slow start to our persuasive website project - partially due to things outside of my control and partially by design.  This project is going to be a big and it's going to be largely self-managed.  My hope is that by scheduling a few days where we won't be doing research it will give students who are having a difficult time getting started, time to get their feet under them, make some progress at home on their own time, and be set up for success once our project hits its full momentum in the middle of next week.

So, to be successful, by class-time next Wednesday (the 27th) each student should have at least the following done:

Settle once and for all on your big research subject.
Nuclear power or Pet Adoption?

Determine what your topics are going to be. 
How many will you have?  You need at least three, not including your introduction.

Have a list of at least five solid resources.
These can include websites, people, books, videos, etc.

Have a solid start on gathering information.
This is going to look a little bit different for every person.  If you only have three facts written down by next Wednesday, that's not enough.  If you have ten, you're probably okay.  If you have more than ten, that's really great.

As you write your short stories for publication, use this blog post to help you use appearance, clothes, actions,. speech and environment to show your character's personality.

Just before you were born, when someone had a research assignment to do for school, how did they get their information?  Instead of using the internet, they had to go to the library to find resources.  The bad part about the library was that there weren't as many resources there as there are on the internet.  The good part of going to the library was that everything someone would find had been placed there by a librarian who has already decided if the material is reliable or not.

With the internet, we get a huge amount of information, but since anyone can post it, it's now up to each individual user to decide if a resource is reliable or not.

Today, you're going to get some tips on how to figure out if you can trust a website.

Pick one of the websites you are using and do the following:
1. Go to the checklist for evaluating websites.
    What do you think?  Does this website seem reliable?

2. Go to Alexa.com to see what other sites linked to your website.  
    Have you heard of any of these sites?  How many are there?

3.  Don't forget that you can use search engines like Sweet Search, that have tried to narrow the results down to reliable websites before you even begin your search.

Check out this video from Common Craft on how to find what you want on the internet efficiently.

Here are some search tips:

• Don't search with questions; search with keywords.
  
• Imagine what words will be on the site you would like to find.
  
• You probably want to ignore the advertised sites at the top.  They paid to be there.
• Words like of, the, a, and in are usually left out of your query.
  
• Use quotation marks to search for phrases.  For example, searching for sand sharks will look for those two words in any order in any places on a website, but "sand sharks" searches for that exact phrase in that exact order any place on a website.
  
• Sort your Google search results by reading level.
• Use a search engine that automatically gives you reliable results like Sweet Search.