mosaic + squidoo

Today, I would like to introduce a lens, well, a set of lenses, that I’ve been working on. My motivation for making a lens on California Missions is three-fold. First, I found that while there are many websites on the missions, many are very old, terrible looking, outdated with broken links, and provide little information or few pictures/videos of each mission. Second, nearly all of the websites I visited organized their links to other mission resources in a general section. If you were looking for information only about a single mission, you’d have to do a lot of clicking around. Third, I thought that there might be a good selling opportunity here, so I integrated Amazon modules of relevant books and things into my lenses.

But why California Missions at all? I’m from California, and studying the California missions is a required portion of the state’s history curriculum for fourth grade. Unfortunately, I switched schools around then and ended up in an accelerated school that had already completed California history by the time I arrived. I was unable to share in the experience of writing a research report and, the biggest portion of the project, making a model of a mission. That is until my three siblings had to go through the experience, and I had to help them. And boy, did my parents go through a lot with all their procrastination! There are 21 California missions; they all site along El Camino Real from San Francisco to San Diego. For the project that nearly ALL 4th graders must go through, you must discuss a little bit about the general history of the Spanish mission’s founding, then provide details of the specific mission you’ve chosen or been assigned. Finally, you have to build a model (to scale for the best grade!) or, perhaps in these days, you could make a YouTube video.

The strategy for my set of lenses was to first build an opening lens, my main California Missions page. On this page, I would provide links to the front pages of many general mission history websites. I would also provide links to another Squidoo page, one for each individual mission. For the sake of listing them all here, they are (in order of founding) Mission San Diego de Alcalá, Mission San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo, Mission San Antonio de Padua, Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, Mission San Luis Obispo, Mission San Francisco de Asís, Mission San Juan Capistrano, Mission Santa Clara de Asís, Mission San Buenaventura, Mission Santa Barbara, Mission La Purísima Concepcíon, Mission Santa Cruz, Mission Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, Mission San José, Mission San Juan Bautista, Mission San Miguel de Arcángel, Mission San Fernando Rey de España, Mission San Luis Rey de Francia, Mission Santa Inés, Mission San Rafael Arcángel, and Mission San Francisco de Solano. On each of these pages, in addition to having a section from the official homepage of the mission and Wikipedia, I’ve included links that go directly to the mission specific page on the websites listed earlier on the main missions page. I’ve also tried to add mission specific books and DVDs from Amazon. With Squidoo, I could even add YouTube videos, which I found particularly cool because many of them are 4th grade mission projects made by 4th graders. I hope my lenses are useful for teachers, parents, and the 4th graders.

In terms of hoping to makes sales on Amazon, I was a little disappointed that they no longer have paper models of each mission on sale anymore. You now have to find them by going directly to the seller’s website. I figured that would be a great seller since making the models tend to be the most time-consuming and parent-stressing task. Building the model is a lot easier if you’ve already built a small, cheap paper model to look at. I haven’t done much in promoting these lenses though. Other than working on tags, I haven’t done much. I forget when students tend to do these projects, but I assume there may be a traffic spike then. Surprisingly, Google has already sent some people my way. I’ve also contacted webmasters of a couple of site I link to to see if they’ll link to my page. Unsurprisingly, a couple of emails bounced back, and I haven’t heard from most of the others.

AND, huge pleasant surprise, someone bought a book about missions from Amazon yesterday so now I have $0.25 in my dashboard $$$ column! I think it wasn’t a book I was promoting on the site, though. I’ll have to double-check.