The topic is about an important and exciting aspect of Australian History that is often overlooked or forgotten.

The topic is : The History of the Australian Whaling Industry.

Method: Find good web sites that have information about this topic. Highlight and copy and paste the web URLs (addresses) onto a Word or FrontPage document.

Then make up some questions that get the students to record the basic facts about :-

- the history of the industry in Australia.
- the a) methods used to  hunt the whales b) how the whales were 'processed' and c) what whale products were produced and what they were used for.
- who the whale hunters were and where they came from.
- any famous whale hunters.
- how women were involved in the industry.
- the economic gains it brought to our country.
- what effects the industry had on where people lived in the young country.
- why the industry died out and what effects this had on the young country at the time.

Get some interesting pictures to illustrate your web lesson.

Make up some interesting and thought provoking activities.

Have at least one primary source document with a question about its reliability or usefulness to a historian studying Australian whaling history.

Hotmail it home to yourself so you can continue to work on it at home or store it in your student section of your school computer server so you can work on it next period or lunchtime.

You have eight school days and one weekend to complete this task.

To start, try typing 'history whaling' in a Google IMAGE search, click the Australian search button. Also in a Google document search, try typing 'history whaling industry' or 'History Australia Whaling' etc....

Help tips for working with MS Expression Web (or the older FrontPage):
To find an animated picture to use on a FrontPage page, for e.g. a swimming whale, type 'whale ani' in a Google Image search. 'Ani' is short for animated.

Then open up the actual picture on the site and right mouse click it, and select 'save picture as' and select to put it in your own folder on the student server or a USB thumb disk.

Type 'whale song wave' in Google to find a whale song sound file. Right click 'save target as...' to get a copy of the sound file. Just right click a whale picture on your worksheet and make a hyperlink to the sound file.

Type 'whale game' in Google to find a good interactive game that the students can play when they are waiting for the rest of their class to complete this web lesson making project.

For more information on making Web Pages

From: http://www.interactive-learning.com.au