Tuesday, August 11, 2009

WebQuests

A webquest is defined as "an inquiry-oriented activity in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the Internet" (Dodge, 1995). They were first designed in 1995 by Dodge & March.

They also state that "WebQuests are a learning tool that leverages the power of the Web with clever learning design to create outstanding results in all learners"(Dodge & March). I believe using webquests in classrooms for the new age kids would be engaging and interesting to them and it would meet the demands of their different learning styles and abilities with technology.

In one of our courses as a first year we had to design and make a webquest, we worked in pairs and we had to choose a year level, topic and an inquiry approach. We chose to do pollution. We aimed it at grade 1 or 2 and used youtube clips and graphics to engage the students. Younger students will be able to work through a webquest, but older students will be able to design and make their own webquests on topics they are learning about. You could use a webquest as the assessment tool and have students make a short webquest of their own and have maybe 5 pages or links and use pictures and video clips to engage their peers.

I believe webquests would be a great tool to engage and teach students about topics in different ways. When i become a teacher i will use webquests as an aspect of my units to teach the new age kids.

1 comment:

  1. I think web quests are a great learning tool. I can imagine it would be quiet time consuming to create an engaging, informative investigative quest. Teacher's need to pool their web quests to share with each other, having access to a variety of different web quests would be a valuabe resource for a range of age levels and key learning areas.

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