School has let out and the first week or two of luxurious enjoyment with no classes to teach have gradually faded into boredom and... what is that?- a need to be a teacher.
The same way that we dread our students going away for the summer, losing a good third of the knowledge we worked so hard to help them gain over the school year, we should dread our own lethargy over the summer break. After all, how much work did you put into teaching yourself new strategies to implement in your classroom? How much of it might you lose through the months of letting the practice be replaced by the mundane?
OK so maybe I'm making it more dramatic than it seems - but I've long since hit the boredom and need to be a teacher. So, in answer to my melodrama, I'm compiling a three-lesson "summer school" for teachers. We're going to start with the WebQuest and go on to... who knows yet? We'll see when I get there ;-)
In this lesson, we're going to do the WebQuest. If you start from the beginning and actually do what you read as you read it, you'll have a complete and ready-to-use WebQuest by the time you're done reading.
About WebQuests
WebQuests are a student-centered and inquiry-based Web application. Their success in the classroom is fascinating.
In short, the WebQuest challenges a student to explore the Internet for more information. Most WebQuests include the links that the teacher has selected as being appropriate for students to research, and suggestions for traditional book-based research. Combine this approach with a scenario of interest to students and you've already got the hook you need to get students involved.
As far as how a WebQuest is constructed, there are a lot of models and a lot of different ideas. Personally, I'm big on the idea of project-based learning and practically require a "good" WebQuest to include some final result that a student can see, hold, feel, and proudly display. Traditionally, WebQuests also contain Introduction, Process, Task, List of Resources, Conclusion, and Evaluation sections.
As an overview of what a WebQuest contains and how it is produced, the following diagram is a great help.
Ready to dig in? Good!
Background Development
When we teach our students to write, we teach them the writing process. The
