Introduction

Back in the old days before 1994, students had to use textbooks, magazines, television and the library to collect information. These are still good things, but now you can also use the World Wide Web. Explore the Internet links on this page and look for good facts, quotations, examples, images, sound clips and video files. Imagine that you're an explorer in cyberspace and your job is to come back from a virtual journey with lots of artifacts and souvenirs to teach people back home what you learned! What's collected can then be pasted into a Word document to start with. Later, we'll look at doing more with your scrapbook.

Keep this question in mind as you work:

What are the stages that a hero has to go through before he or she can really be a hero? Use the headings from the websites (hint: look especially at the Making of a Myth website) as headings for your Word document and then paste in an example for each category.

Instructions

1. Explore the Internet sites linked below. You're looking for facts, quotes, examples, images, sound clips, videos, and animations that you think are important aspects of the topic.

2. When you find something you like, check its Web page for a copyright notice. Often, students are encouraged to copy things that will only be used in the classroom. Sometimes people don't want their work copied at all. A good practice is looking for an e-mail link on the page and then using it to ask permission.

3. Copy any text you want by dragging across the words, then using the Edit - Copy command on the menubar. Paste what you highlighted into a basic text editor, word processor, desktop publishing program or multimedia program.

4. Save images you like by downloading them. Paste the images you've downloaded into a multimedia, paint or desktop publishing program (like HyperStudio, Clarisworks, or PageMaker) or use one of the graphics viewers listed as Tools on this page to display your collection of images.

5. Be prepared to cut anything that copyright owners tell you they don't want you to have.

6. Once you have collected your information, go over it carefully so that you can give clear and thoughtful reasons why you found the things you collected especially important.
   

The Internet Resources

• Star Wars: The Magic of Myth - This virtual exhibition from the Smithsonian Instute in America shows what's involved in creating the Star Wars legends. It gives a good idea of what they did to create the heroes in the films.

• The Official Star Wars site - This site is the official one for the films.

• Star Wars kids site - This site is one you may be familiar with. It's the official ones for kids.

• Scrapbook on Star Wars - This site has more links on Star Wars and information about creating your own StarWars scrapbook on computer.

• English activities on Star Wars - This site is written for Australian students and teachers and contains activities and information on the films. From page 7 there is an article about the making of a hero that you will need to read.

• Star Wars - A New Hope - This is part of the Smithsonian virtual exhibition you looked at earlier but this time there are links to the different parts of a hero's journey, with pictures, sketches, artworks and artefacts for each topic. There are 17 topics in all so you can see just how involved the story is.

• Star Wars versus Star Trek - This article looks at comparisons between Star Wars and Star Trek and also questions some of the ideas about heroes in the other websites.

Tools

References

Hypertext Webster Dictionary

Get definitions to many words quickly.

Roget's Internet Thesaurus

Find words that have similar meanings to words you run across.

Grabbing Web Images

Follow a friendly step-by-step tutorial on how to grab images from the Web.