Dillon 4-Her finds a "Home on the Web"

8/1/01

            BOZEMAN - The World Wide Web: Everybody's surfing it. But Anna Marxer, a 16-year-old    4-H'er from Dillon decided, why be a surfer when you can be a builder? She learned from scratch how to make her own Web site through the Montana 4-H Webmasters group.

            "When I started, I knew very little about the Internet, and absolutely nothing about making web pages," the Beaverhead County teen recalls. "So my first year, I made a pretty basic web page, and I was pretty involved in Webmasters."

She still had to make a notebook about the project, and after putting in some hard work, her self-determined project won first place in the county. With that encouragement, Marxer, who has also taken projects on hogs, steers, entomology, sewing, range, dog obedience and child development during her eight years in the Dillon Highlighters 4-H club, decided to take the 4-H Webmaster program again.  

"I decided to totally remake my web page, because I learned a lot more technical stuff this year, and I gave it a little more polished look," says Marxer. She also researched and gave a speech about Internet safety, including how search engines can hit on adult sites even when searching on innocent words. 

Fair time came again, and Anna's efforts won once more. She is continuing to add to her own home page, work on her club's web site and tutor others on web design.

This has led to her latest project: "I am trying to get a community service project going in Beaverhead County with 4-H'ers tutoring senior citizens on the Internet and computers," she says. "I have been promoting this project on the radio, in our county newsletter, and by going to 4-H clubs and talking about it. I have gotten a lot of interest."

As Anna says, "4-H isn't just for farm kids. It's for all kids now in the technology age." 

You can visit Anna's web site at http://www.montana.edu/4hweb/profiles/amarxer/index.html

Please send  questions or comments (plus your name, location and the subject of the story you read) to Suzi Taylor and Carol Flaherty, MSU Communications Services, Bozeman, MT 59717 or email us at: carolf@montana.edu.

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