Project 1 - Integrating the internet into Secondary Classrooms

First, I have to say, I love this project. This was a lot of fun, and as this is my first actual Education class, it's been a good exercise for learning how to come up with a project for my future students. Very cool. :)
I chose my standard based on what interests me in literature, and what I think my students will remember going forward.

EL.LIT.3.6 2006 Evaluate the way in which authors have used archetypes (original models or patterns, such as best friend, champion, crusader, free spirit, nurturer, outcast, tyrant, and others) drawn from myth and tradition in literature, film, political speeches, and religious writings. [11.3.6/12.3.6]

I then narrowed it down from all archetypes, to heroes of twentieth century literature. The twentieth century is an interesting time in literature however, because we've broken the media mold. We now have books, television, movies, comics, the internet etc... So it's a bit broader than previous centuries. I tried to hit on a few heroes from books, movies and comics to show the breadth of literature throughout the 20th century, and I also tried to find heroes who would fit the assignment well.

I honestly found the trackstar portion of the project to be the most difficult. Beyond trackstar being slow, old and a pain, searching for websites that would lead my students where I wanted them to go was tricky as well. I wanted them to focus on the fatal flaw of each of the heroes listed in the project, but I found it difficult to find a lot of writing on the subject for some of the heroes. The easiest thing, would have been to just point all of my links to wikipedia, but that would have been cheap. I spent a good deal of time searching for articles that showed what I was looking for, and luckily none of them had annoying banners, or weird extraneous information that wouldn't have been appropriate for this project.

The only real difficulty, like I said earlier was dealing with trackstar. Their site is so old and slow, many times I would wait upwards of 5 minutes for a page to load. I also ran into problems when trying to use a youtube video for one of my links. It wouldn't show in the trackstar frame. I tried using the regular http: url, the embed url and even the old style embed url, none of which worked. In the end, I just used the regular url and an annotation directing the students to watch the video on youtube. I really like the philosophy of trackstar, that of guided learning, but it appears the last time they did anything with the site was 2005. The internet and internet standards have made some significant leaps since then, and trackstar is definitely feeling it. If the site admins were to update this to current web standards (for example supporting browsers beyond Mozilla 1.3 beta /facepalm) seeing as Mozilla Firefox is now on version 12, this could be an excellent tool.