You and your students need to plan and design the layout of your class' CultureQuest website early in the process. Together, design your home page and lay it out. Decide how it will link to both the core information the class collects and the specific cultural area being studied by each small group of students. When students have collected the "core" information, post it on the site as soon as that information is available. When students have completed their small group tasks on an area of the culture, post these on the website.

The website you and your students are developing is an educational website, not just an informational website. As such, it should not only be chock full of information it should also attempt to interest other children in the subject so they will be motivated to learn more about the culture. Clearly, here is where not only interesting content is important but graphics, pictures, video etc. might also be useful. The students' text should be written in their own words and not be a 'cut and paste' of information copied from the Web. In some areas, the website should provide somewhat less information directly but direct the reader to many useful and annotated links to web resources. It might include interactive opportunities for example, a quiz or pretest might be included so that readers might test themselves on what they know about the culture before they look at the site. A survey revealing common misconceptions about a culture would also be interesting and revealing. Other ways readers can interact with the information on the site include: inviting readers to leave informed comments, puzzles that might provide useful information, as well as quizzes or other games with content appropriate to the site.

Templates for websites are included in the Technology Toolkit as are tutorials for other web editors. Depending upon the age, skill levels of the students and available time, students might learn skills that range from taking an image from the web to building their own web pages with voice and video.

CultureQuest websites might include not only text and appropriate hyperlinks but graphics, animation, sound and maybe video. (See also Criteria for a Good Website in the Technology Toolkit.) The idea is not to focus attention on the "glitz", but rather on the quality of the research. Once that is in place and students want to play with the rest- that will only enhance the quality of the site. Glitz with no quality is simply not acceptable. Quality with no glitz is okay but risks being boring and not something other students will want to read.

The CultureQuest class website should be a resource for others to use to learn about the culture studied. It will contain links to a large collection of other useful sites. You may decide to put the website on your school's server with a link to our www.culturequest.us site or, if you do not have a server, we will post the site for you on our server.