Q3 Benchmark: NHD Gay Rights

This is the Quarter 3 history benchmark of Maxime Damis, Julia Boyer, and Luna Frank-Fischer. It is a website featuring the debates over Gay Rights throughout history. Enjoy!

Our website is HERE

    I those this topic for my NHD paper and project because it was always something that interested me. The struggle and debates that surround gay rights have changed and developed largely in my lifetime. I had learned a lot about those changes but I was intrigued by what happened before my lifetime that I had not yet known. It interested me deeply, so I chose to use gay rights as my topic. My group chose to do a website for our presentation because it was able to incorporate the most aspects possible. We chose to include a video of historical speeches, a Prezi interactive timeline, and a word analysis for each. These were best represented through a website.
    We were able to create an attractive website that effectively showed the debates through history of gay rights. This we did very well. We had an incredible amount of information and pages of primary and secondary sources. This we did very, very well. Where we went wrong was our lack of reading the specific guidelines in the website submission for National History Day. We failed to see the rules against embedding Prezi's and videos. We also exceeded the word restriction for the website. Had we deleted the Prezi and video, our project would not have been an effective way of representing our knowledge. From there, we made the decision to turn our website in for our school benchmark but adjust the video clips to eventually come up with a video representation of what we learned for the competition, within the documentary category instead. If I were able to do this project again, I would have made sure every single one of my group members read the guidelines thoroughly so that we would encounter this problem again. It was a minor setback, but a setback nonetheless. Otherwise, I would not have done anything else differently. I was very proud of the work my group produced.
    Through this project, I learned a large amount of information about the changes and debates around gay rights. I had known some previous knowledge but did not know as many specifics. I learned about Harvey Milk and all of his struggles as well as a copious amount of information about "Don't ask, don't tell" and the government's involvement in the evolution of gay rights. Through the creation of the presentation, I learned how to be flexible and adaptable because of our sudden changes in what we were to do to be able to submit to NHD. I also learned how well I worked with both of my group members throughout this project and how efficiently a project can be created, changed, and recreated when your partners are all on track and working hard.

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