Creating a webquest that was more
than a worksheet on the Internet was difficult. It seemed fairly
simple at the start. After delving into it I discovered I had a lot
to learn! There is a lot of preplanning, directions, and detail
to consider. When creating the quest, goals have to be very clear,
yet there needs to be self direction on the part of the student.
It is also important for students to have higher level thinking skills
involved. We didn't get as far as I had hoped. One of the components
in my quest is to have the students get to the point where they will draw
conclusions about the importance of saving endangered species after analysis
of what they learned. I also would like my classes to actually become
involved in helping to save an endangered animal somehow (adopting an acre
of rain forest, giving money to feed an animal at the local zoo, etc.).
We just concluded our ndangered animal unit, so I guess we still have time...........
Knowing how much time class time to allow to complete the project was a
challenge. I allowed five seventy-five minute sessions to complete
the web quest and Power Point slide shows. For most of my students,
this was not enough. I'm still analyzing to determine if my quest
was too long, if my students spent enough time on task, or if I should
have allowed more time for them in the lab. I have only forty-five
minutes to teach science each day. I was able to have seventy-five
minutes by "stealing" time from my social studies class (there's at least
one advantage to teaching multiple subjects!). I couldn't seem to
justify doing that for longer than one week. This is something I'll
have to consider when doing webquests in the future.
Finding computer lab time was
not easy. First, I had to schedule a week and a half in advance because
computer use is very popular with some teachers in our building.
Second, our computer lab is not available at all in the mornings, so I
had to use the library computers during that time. I taught with
Macs in the morning and PCs in the afternoon. I will say I became
more Mac literate! Honestly though, I don't think there's much difference
between the two.
Having students focus on the content
of their slide shows instead of all the animation effects was a constant
challenge. Trying to find a slide show that was not over animated
was reminiscent of finding an exemplary personal web site. It is
hard to be content focused when there is so much "fun stuff" out there
(ok, I admit, I'm a closet clip art junkie).
It was difficult to get across
to students that paragraph writing for slide shows requires the same attention
to grammar and spelling as writing the "old fashioned way". Use your
spell check! I also got tired of explaining over and over that cutting
and pasting from the Internet is similar to ripping a page out of an encyclopedia,
taping it onto your notebook paper, and signing your name at the bottom.
You'll be able to see right away which students understood this concept
and which didn't. Siting the sources used for the creation of the
slide shows was another thing I tried to stress. I'm sad to say only
one group of students actually did this.
A final challenge was to get a
few of my students slide show on a web page. The first mistake was
easy to fix. I had forgotten to save them as web pages. After
that was corrected, I could get them to upload, but I could not view
them when I hit the link. I finally decided to view my web pages
using my husbands computer. They worked! Apparently my laptop
does not have the most updated browser. It took me a lot of
frustration and a very long time to figure out what the problem was.
I had no problems with parental
permission for this project. Everyone involved was very cooperative and
positive.