Think.com and ThinkQuest.org
Think.com, a project of the Oracle Educational Foundation, is an online community for students and teachers. Members of the Think.com community can create personal websites and shared project spaces. ThinkQuest.org holds an annual international educational Website design competition for teacher-led teams of students aged 9-19
Think.com, a project of the Oracle Educational Foundation, is an online community for students and teachers. Members of the Think.com community can create personal websites, which resemble blogs, with up to ten pages and 6 posts per page. Posts can take a number of forms, including photo galleries, mini-forums, and interactive polls. Comments take the form of sticky notes attached to the bottom of each page. In addition to the personal sites, groups can create shared project spaces with the same features. The site provides Admin tools for parents and teachers to communicate and review content.
Another Oracle Education Foundation project, ThinkQuest.org, holds an annual international educational Website design competition for teacher-led teams of students aged 9-19. Students form teams, recruit a teacher as a coach, and work together to create a website (outside of the Think.com framework) on a topic within a range of categories. Categories include Books & Literature, Business & Industry, History & Government, Math, Science & Technology, Social Sciences & Culture, among others. The website hosts all of the entries in its extensive library, and highlights the winners in each of 4 age groups. 1st place winners from 2006 were e-Divide, a website on information inequality; A Dollar a Day, exploring international poverty, and It's All Mine!, a site on mining and minerals. Two of the three 1st place winners were teams comprised of students from multiple countries. The website offers a step by step guide for joining the competition and submitting entries, and a resource guide for coaches covering the web development process from planning, through building web pages to finishing and submitting the project. The section on Building web pages includes a basic primer, and an abundance of links to technical resources. The Foundation also offers an Adobe Software grant to qualifying teams to help level the technical playing field.