NHD Process Paper - Aaron Johnson, Natasha Ashby, Amber Altomare

Process:

The three of us stumbled upon our topic when the assignment was first given by our eleventh grade American History teacher, Ms. Diana Laufenberg. Our topic, Segregation In Schools, deals with the negatives, and also the positives of how schools came to be segregated and why they were useful and also racist and unfair. The three of us have always been interested in the ways segregated schools worked and how the white schools differed from the black schools. Since the three of us had this common interest, we chose to base our National History Day project around this topic.

Before creating our website to display school segregation, we each wrote an essay about a topic that had to do with another topic we found interesting. Aaron wrote his essay about segregation in schools so we were able to use some of his sources when it came time to create our website. We used numerous links from outside sources, along with the sources Aaron used for his essay.

When it came time to put all of the details and pictures into the website, we had to take a minute to decide what type of website we were going to use. In the end, the three of us agreed to make a tumblr blog because it was the best and most accessible way to display our information and pictures. The tumblr blog has numerous pictures with citations and also several excerpts that give details about school segregation. 

In the end, we enjoyed working together on this project. We were able to work together and come to a consensus and complete the task at hand. The link to our blog is schoolsegregation.tumblr.com


Reflection:

It was somewhat challenging for us to think of a solid way to present our information for the third quarter benchmark. Our first idea was to create a skit to perform in front of the class. After some difficulty with the writing of the script, we decided it would be best fit to create a website of some sort. The next struggle was choosing what type of website we wanted to use. Having already been familiar with tumblr, I told Amber and Natasha that I thought a tumblr blog would be the best fit because it makes it easy for the three of us to work in it together, but also separately. Tumblr is also very user friendly so if Natasha and Amber didn't know how to use the website, I would be able to help them and it is also pretty easy to figure it out.

One thing that really went well while creating this project was finding ideas and sources. Our topic, Segregation In Schools was pretty easy to search for on the internet because there are so many newspaper articles, online journals, and plenty of primary sources to sort through. Some groups had plenty of secondary sources but had some difficulty when it came time to find primary sources. Luckily, Natasha, Amber, and I didn't have that problem.

If I had to change this project or do something differently, I would use more of the sources that we found as a group. While our final product has numerous sources and primary documents and pictures, I think we could have spent more time sorting through and our final website could have had even more sources for our viewers to look at. 

Comments