I can remember sitting in History class when being told about the Internal Assessment that each student had to complete.  Our teacher went over all the different formats that we could choose from, and immediately I thought about doing a website.  He later recommended that everyone create a website, but I had already made up my mind that I wanted to.  There are so many possibilities with a website: I thought of making the perfect web layout, having the website packed with multimedia, and even of creating virtual tours.  As usual, I got carried away with daydreams and details and forgot about the amount of work that would be required of me in order to complete the assignment. 

   I chose the topic of Roman Toulouse, known as Tolosa in that era, because I have always been fascinated with the Roman epoch, and I remembered the museums that I had visited and how they had intrigued me.  At the beginning I took the initiative quite well: I asked a friend if he wanted to work with me and pool our efforts, I dug out the many books that I had on the topic of Rome, and I even started visiting museums.  Our teacher was quite impressed and even mentioned that the website we create be used as the website for one of the museums that we visited.  But as time went by and work built up, my interest was distracted by other work and the website took up a position on the back burner.  Despite my best efforts to complete the website, it did not stand up in the face of other looming and more pressing work. 

   During our research, we came to the conclusion that the best, and maybe most interesting, approach to this website would be to build it with the question in mind of how typical was Tolosa as a Roman city.  Our intention here was to focus on a topic that not only interested us, but also was based on local and regional historical sites.  We also hoped that our website could be quite informative for those interested in the region since there was no single source to which one could refer.  Because I was interested in the Roman era, I had already visited all the museums in Toulouse that were related to this topic.  Therefore, it was quite easy for me to remember the useful ones and I recommended which of them we should visit.  I also found a contact, a tour guide, upon whom we became heavily dependent.  I set up many appointments with Monsieur Casagrande, a guide very knowledgeable on the topic of Roman Toulouse.  With him we were able to visit several museums and sites that were off-limits to the general public. 

   After we did research and gathered information, we had to write the content that would be included in our website.  Then, while I wrote the conclusion to our work, Matthew reflected on the sources, upon which we had based our research.  When all the content was gathered and complete, it was merely a problem of integrating it, in the best way possible, into a website.  It was here, the part heavily reliant upon technology that we encountered our greatest difficulties.  First of all, I am ashamed to admit it, but I am not nearly as fluent in HTML programming as I would have liked, and should have been, based on previous work and study I had done.  This created many formatting problems that were quite difficult to overcome.  There was also the problem with computer availability as well.  I am used to working on my stable and reliable computer at home.  Unfortunately, working in a group makes it difficult to work outside of school without some unfair splits in the amount of work done by each person.  In the end, because the computers at school were few and either did not work, or worked intermittently, I was forced to work on the majority of the website at my home.  Another problem we encountered was again based on the use of technology.  We tried to use the digital cameras at the school to take pictures of the sites we saw, but either the cameras were in use or the teachers did not want, or were not allowed, to lend them to us.  When we finally did get a camera, the pictures turned out all right, but the interviews did not.  We were told that the camera could take up to one minute of video footage.  Not an ideal amount, we figured we could work around it.  When we went to take the interview, we realized that the camera was only capable of taking five-, ten-, or fifteen-second video clips.  Of course, the teacher is rarely wrong and, after-the-fact, he demonstrated the special technique for recording video clips of one-minute length.  

   To conclude, I would just like to talk about the content of the website.  Our question, “How Typical was Tolosa?” focuses on the layout of Roman cities in general and compares that to Roman Toulouse.  In the end, we concluded that Tolosa was a typical Roman city and that the Romans tended to build their cities with a general template in mind.  However, I do not want to go into details here and spoil the rest of the website, so feel free to browse the rest of the website and please enjoy.