To the Teacher

“Eureka, The Gold Rush Is On!” was the first students’ project that I had ever published on the Internet and I wanted to make it motivating both for me and the kids. To accomplish this, I tried to keep the overall process as simple and straightforward as possible. Some of the steps and choices that I made for this project, I will want my students to do themselves, in the future.

Making the Essays and Illustrations

1) First, I determined the main subject - the California Gold Rush - and the eight subtopics (Discovery of Gold, etc.) I chose key subtopics that had information readily available in the classroom.

2) I then did a lottery to assign students their subtopics. Since my class size was twenty-one, each team had two or three kids.

3) Students next read, took notes, and summarized information in their social studies books related to their subtopics.

4) Each team then wrote a short essay based on their notes.

5) The students then word processed their essays using AlphaSmarts (our school has a cart with 20+ Alphas.)

6) I then transferred the essays to the computer and to Dreamweaver, the html editor that our school uses. (We were fortunate to have help on this part of the project thanks to our school’s technology coordinator, Mr. Lorin Spaulding.)

7) The kids then drew pictures, which I scanned and saved in GIF format. We added these illustrations to the essays, again with Dreamweaver.

8) I also scanned and added a photo of James Marshall’s statue that a child had taken while on a field trip to Coloma.

Finishing the Project

1) For each essay, I added some additional Internet links that my students and I had discovered. We emphasized primary sources, such as letters home from an actual Gold Rush miner or original pictures of the Oregon Trail.

2) I also added a link called ‘Three Routes to California,’ including a telecollaboration that my class had done. The kids wrote mock letters persuading their “families” to come to the mother lode via either the Oregon Trail, Cape Horn, or the Panama shortcut. Other students from around the world then responded to questions related to my students’ letters.

3) Since I had used a supermarket camera to take photos of my kids on a class day trip, I had these developed on a CD and added them to “About the Authors.” (Naturally, I got parental permission prior to publishing kids’ pictures on the Web.)

4) Next, the teams each read aloud their essays and showed their illustrations to their classmates.

5) During a class brainstorming session, the students made up questions and creative multiple-choice answers. Lorin Spaulding turned these into our entertaining electronic quiz.

6) This project made a wonderful presentation at our spring Open House. I set the project up on the computer, plus a video projector and screen, and the students delighted in showing it to their parents.

7) And, next year, my new students will enjoy learning about the California Gold Rush by viewing and studying this project.