Student Created Weeblys

This year I decided to have my ninth grade history students examine the reform movements of the antebellum period by creating a weebly. Each group was assigned one reform movement and was required to find essentially the who, what, where, when and why of the movement. The groups could choose from Education Reform, Prison Reform, Mental Health Reform, Temperance and Women's Education Reform. The students were presented with the task below:

To create a website that answers the following question:

Was the nineteenth century reform movement assigned to you successful?

Your must address the following information:
• Explain the problem your movement is addressing
• Significant people involved in the movement and his/her contributions
• Methods used by the movement to get their message out – How did the movement go about fixing the problem?
• Outcome – Was the movement effective? Did it fix the problem? This will be an opinion supported by information that you discovered.

In addition to the students' research into their issue they had to find at least one primary source and images and charts to use in the weebly.

Students were not intimidated by the prospect of developing a weebly. I felt like the research and the bibliography was more of a challenge for them. Many students had used weebly before and had relatively few issues with putting the information into the weebly. The requirements for the weebly were as follows:

• Have a title for your website that demonstrates your topic and would capture a person’s attention.
• The names of the group members need to be on the page.
• Visuals - You have charts, pictures, artwork, etc. that are relevant to your topic.
• There are captions or brief explanations for ALL visuals.
• Have well defined categories of information
• All the required information is thoroughly addressed in the website.
• The website is organized and easy to navigate.
• There is an explanation of your primary source and a link to the website where it is located.
• You have a bibliography on the website. This includes websites for the visuals.
• All information and captions are grammatically correct and there are not any spelling errors.
• Yu must remain ON TASK during class time.
• All information must be IN YOUR OWN WORDS. Any cutting/pasting from the internet, magazine, encyclopedia, books, etc. will result in a 0. Changing one or two words from the source does not constitute the writing as being in your own words.

The only major problems the students ran into was putting the images into the weebly at school. There must be something with my school's firewall that made downloading pictures virtually impossible. Luckily students did not experience the same problems at home and were able to get the pictures in there.

Some examples of my students' work can be found at the links below:

http://educationreformin1800s.weebly.com/

http://punishmentorpenitence.weebly.com/

For next year I plan on altering the assignment so that the weebly would be written as if one of the reformers of the time period was creating the site. By having students put themselves into someone else's shoes they may understand better the passion these reformers felt for these causes.