WebQuest madness

I really like Webquests and can see their merit in the class. I think it is a lot of work for the teacher, but I think the students, for the most part, will enjoy them more than a lecture. They also seem like they would lead to higher levels of learning due to the involvement the student would have in the process.

I hope and plan to use webquests as part of a unit fat least once a year, maybe more. I will use them for introductions to certain novels, or as an entire unit, like the heroes unit our webquest covered. I will also use them to show students how topics are still relevant today. For example, our webquest on heroes was to show students that the heroes in literature are not just in the past. They are still being used in movies and books today.

The process of creating our webquest in a group had its advantages and disadvantages. It worked well to have people to bounce ideas off and come up with the plan, but the disadvantage was not having enough time to work on them together. It worked well that we had one member of our group that loved the visual aspect and offered to put it all into the powerpoint format. It also worked having a googledoc page for all of us to brainstorm on. I feel that ou group worked well together. I don’t feel as if there was one person doing more of the work than another person, we all pulled our fair share. For example, I did most of the actual writing, but we all found websites about each of the heroes and posted them on our googledoc page, so it was more of the organizing I did. Hailee made the teacher’s page and took care of making sure that was all ready to add in. And Justin put everything into the powerpoint format we chose.

I think that we might have needed a bit more instruction on how to put it together, like having the rubric sooner so we all knew what we needed to work on. If I were to do another group webquest, I would make sure we knew what was needed first; make sure we knew the rubric before we started. I would also have set times like “ok, we will all be online tonight at 8:30pm and work on this for xxx amount of time.” I also would have liked to have a few minutes just to make sure everything was finalized, but since I was unable to be in class today, that didn’t happen. I also think next time I might narrow it down. There is just so much information out there that it is easy to be overwhelmed.

I would really like to have spent a bit more time in class talking about the different formats. It seemed as if we rushed through it really fast. I think our group chose a powerpoint format because we didn’t really know how to put it in another one. I honestly think you actually showed my curriculum class more about how to build a webquest. And make it live. I don’t really feel super confident about making a webquest to go online. I love what we did and think that content wise, our webquest was strong, but I am not sure if I like it being in a powerpoint format. So I would really like to actually know how to take our content and put it into a true webquest format so it can be found online. Does that make sense?