Daniel Albert

Ms. Rasmussen/Biology A

Daniel’s Website Journal

12/3/07

As our first day working together in a team on this project, I spent most of the time learning to edit and add to our website.  After I had familiarized myself with how it all worked, I began studying the Acidophilus.

We couldn’t find any search results in nettrekker no matter what we tried, so I was forced to use the free web after testing each source for accuracy.  We found after some testing of Wikipedia that the article there was quite reliable, and used it for much of our research.

12/4/07

I continued finding more information about our bacteria, and finished making the timeline for our project.  In addition, we decided who would cover which tasks, and that Bonham would be our web master. 

We divided up all the tasks using the timeline, although I felt a bit like I gave myself all the hardest tasks (I had to research beneficial properties of the bacteria, what happens if this bacteria is not in its environment, interesting or unusual facts and recent scientific/medical research with this project. 

12/5/07

More research was done to find more on the bacteria, and I used the citation builder to start adding up my sources.  It was tough to find enough sources for my research besides Wikipedia, but I managed to find some more using the free web.

Nettrekker was of no use to me whatsoever, as no results even came up for “lactobacillus”, let alone “acidophilus”. 

12/6/07

I was at a basketball tournament all day and wasn’t able to do any research.

12/7/07

Today I continued to use the free web to research Lactobacillus Acidophilus, being sure to test all the websites for accuracy (usually by checking if they list sources, and looking at the citations to see if they seem unbiased). 

Also, I started compiling all of my information into a single document for easy viewing, and put it in the notes section.

12/9/07

I was having internet difficulties today, with my dad trying to put a password on our internet (we suspected the neighbors of leeching), so I wasn’t able to do any additional research.

I started looking for more things to add to the website, but it’s difficult to find many videos with Acidophilus being largely unknown to us at the moment.

12/10/07

I finished putting together all of my sources into one group using citation builder, and placed them into one file in My Documents to put on the website later.  The whole internet problem was resolved, so I could continue researching for strange and interestingthings about the Acidophilus. 

The interesting things category turned out to be more difficult than I expected, as I had to find things that separated it from other bacteria in strange ways.  Being in the rather large lactobacillus kingdom, many bacteria could be considered similar to Acidophilus, but I managed to find a few differences.

12/11/07

With not much else to do on our project, I went around checking all of my citations to be sure that I put down all the information correctly.  I found that all the information had been put down correctly.

12/12/07

I proofread all of my information for spelling and grammar errors, and made sure that the rest of my teammates were doing good work as well.  Also, I showed it around to my family, and told some of my other friends who didn’t mind proofreading it what the URL was. 

Most people told me it was great, but a few pointed out grammatical errors to me, which I corrected.

12/13/07

I showed my project to my parents, and was surprised to hear that my mom had some information about Acidophilus (nothing really new, since she got her biology degree over twenty years ago, but it was still very useful).  It turned out that I had been taking acidophilus pearls every breakfast and dinner for a few years now.  Well I knew that I was taking a vitamin every breakfast and dinner, but I didn’t know that it was an acidophilus pearl.

12/14/07

Due to nothing else that needed doing on my part in the website, and that I had two hands full of homework, I wasn’t able to do anything with the website today.

12/16/07

I uploaded all of my information onto the website, and looked through all of it for spelling and grammatical errors for the last time.