Student webpages: Insects of Cornell

For the course I'm teaching this fall (Insect Diversity and Evolution, ENTOM 3310/3311), the students each designed a webpage on their favorite species of insect that could be found at Cornell. Check it out!

The unifying theme is “Insects of Cornell” (insectsofcornell.weebly.com), and each student picked an insect that could be found here in our region and then designed a page around it, all of which are accessed via photo links from the central class page. Some students used insects they had collected for the lab portion of the class. Many of them used original photos.

The students chose a target audience for our site and learned about some basic website design guidelines. In the site development process, they went through a peer review of each other’s site design and content and learned a bit about website analytics. Also, we visited the Cornell University Insect Collection to find our individual species in the collections and to add a collection-based fact to the sites.

We used the free Weebly for Education platform. None of the students had made their own website prior to this semester & overall, it seemed like the students caught on quickly. The biggest problem I encountered is that the individual sites are often down. Clicking on the link gives a message: "This page isn't working" -- which is an issue on the Weebly end. That's a little disappointing, and I hope it improves.