Week 5: WebQuests

-


I have read about WebQuests and definitely think that they are great, I discovered there are two types of WebQuests Short-term WebQuests and Long-term WebQuests.
1.      Short-term WebQuests:  These aim at making students understand the most significant new information and make sense of it. They might last for three of four classes and will involve learners in browsing different sites to get information and use it for achieving the aims of the class.
2.      Long-term WebQuests: These aim at making students analyze a body of knowledge deeply, they should show that they do not only understand the information but can debate and produce something out of it; it could be a product, report, a presentation and interview survey and so on.
 The process for WebQuests involves research skills, analyzing skills and word processing skills.

Interesting note:
Bernie Dodge, a professor of Educational Technology at San Diego State University has been one of the first people to attempt to define and structure this kiond of learning activities. He said “a WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented activity in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the internet”

Comments

  1. Lazy catJuly 24, 2011 at 7:20 PM

    Hi Prof. Javier,

    I agree that Rubrics have become an integral part of teaching and learning and that instructors should take best advantage of rubric in evaluating their students’ performance. To make best use of rubrics, as an instructor we have to show our students how to judge and evaluate the information they search for. In addition, introducing an evaluation in the form of a rubric at the beginning of the course should be done first in order that students know what they need to do to be successful and evaluate the quality of their own work.

    Regarding the information about WebQuests that you read, you can say it again WebQuests are great tool for PBL and can motivate students’ critical thinking, analysis and processing skills. I think you can use rubistar tool for creating rubrics to evaluate your students’ work in the form of long-term WebQuests that are related to a product, report, a presentation and interview survey.

    I wonder how can you assess your students’ performance in using short-term WebQuests?

    Hope we can share ideas.

    Phuong-Mai

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 7: Learning Autonomously

-
Learner Autonomy is one my favorite topic when it comes to teaching; I truly believe it plays an essential role in the acquisition of the L2. The best way we could foster Learner Autonomy is in a student-centered class, as we all may know, in   student-centered class is not a place where the students decide what they want to learn and what they what to do. It is a place where we consider the needs of the students, as individuals and as a group and encourage them to participate in the learning process all the time, the role of the teacher should be a facilitators and not an instructor and just guide or help students while they participate in the learning process actively, let us not get confused with the “teacher”. To me, being a teacher means helping students to learn, manage their activities and direct their learning. In the student-centered class the teacher becomes just another member of the class. I enjoyed reading the article by Dimitrios Thanasoulas, especially the part where he
Read more

Week 8: ANVILL is great

-
I am surprised; this site is simply great, what I most like of ANVILL,  is its flexibility; it has got something for every language teacher and the great opportunity for language practice. I definitely think that this site motivates students to do things by themselves making them more autonomous because of when students find many things to do and things they like, they feel eager to go and give it a try. I have used www.agendaweb.org which has tons of stuff for learners of different ages and that is what students like, many options to choose from.   It is hard for all students to have access to internet connection either at the campus at home, here in Ibarra, Ecuador; few people have got internet connection at home. Some will not able to afford it but the main reason is internet speed, it is very slow and princes are a bit high so I think this could be a constraint that would make difficult to use this technology. The solution to overcome this problem is that the government start ha
Read more

Week 6: Large and small classes teaching Techniques

-
I have thought of some techniques and technology that could help when teaching small and large classes Teaching large and small classes is very linked to classroom management, as we all may know, the best number for a class is probably 12 Ss because they can be divided into different groups, for instance, we can make 4 groups of 3, 3 groups of 4, 2 groups of 6. Having 12 Ssas the average numbers of students in class makes it a lot easier for them to hear one another in a whole-class activity. Unfortunately, we cannot choose the number of students in our classes. Most classes are large and I think that the larger the class is the more necessary is to implement technological tools is, one of the differences between large and small classes is the time we have got to monitor students, I think even having 30 students we can still walk around the class during the lesson and spend a few moments listening to each groups and take some notes but with a larger class so we should keep track of
Read more