In the WebQuest, The Fire Burns On, the teacher pulls the intended student in with a task. This teacher poses the following question, How much do you know about the events of the year you were born? What headlines were topping the news? Who won the World Series? Do you know who was President or what was popular at the movies? I chose this lesson as a great WebQuest with much potential because the idea is a simple yet great one. The generation that we teach doesn’t really know much about their existence. If they don’t know about their life, how can we expect them to learn about events that happened 200 years ago? I don’t see this lesson being a hard core benchmark goal assignment but I can see this being a very cool way to do an extra credit assignment or making this a culminating activity that can be changed a little to incorporate world events for history class, social studies, or government.
The WebQuest that I gave a lower score to was titled, American Presidents. This lesson didn’t really welcome higher leveled thinking skills and there just wasn’t enough to span the three weeks that the lesson was supposed to last. I actually taught a one week curriculum on American Presidents and I feel that there really is so much more that this teacher could have added to this lesson. Again, this Inquiry lesson is a perfect example of how using some other people’s inputs can be beneficial.
You made an interesting comment in regards to the allotted time for completing a webquest. I now realize that very few if any of the webquests I looked at even proposed a timeline. In a way, this is helpful in that it gives the teacher true autonomy in how they want to complete the quest (especially as different classes meet for differing days and time periods). However, it may be helpful to someone who has never completed the webquest to have a general idea how many days are being required to complete the entire project. Any thoughts? How many webquests actually gave a time period that you looked at?
ReplyDeleteTo bank off of Stephanie's comment, WebQuests should give a timeline. It's interesting that majority of the ones I reviewed didn't have such a thing. It's always useful in the process and task section to have a day by day tracker of where student's should be. However, one could easily argue that this "day tracker" is then taking out the inquiry learning. Allowing students to use inquiry and venture on their tangents while completing the WebQuest is half the journey of the learning process. The other half is, of course, completing the webquest as intended by the creator. It's so important that teachers do realize that WebQuests are resources, they weren't made perfectly for their classes. Everything in the world needs tweeking... it's not going to be perfect on the first try.
ReplyDelete