WEBQUEST

"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember.
I do and I understand."
                                     
"A WebQuest," according to Bernie Dodge, the originator of the WebQuest concept, "is an inquiry-oriented activity in which most or all of the information used by learners is drawn from the Web. WebQuests are designed to use learners' time well, to focus on using information rather than on looking for it, and to support learners' thinking at the levels of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation."

HELP! WHERE DO I BEGIN?

Before designing a WebQuest, you'll want to have an outline handy to guide you through the process. A number of excellent WebQuest outlines, including Tom March's Prewriting Your WebQuest, will help. Templates such as Dodge's WebQuest Templates are also available online.


THE DESIGN PROCESS

Once you have your outline or template in hand, here are some main points to include:

The Topic. You may have already decided on a topic related to current events or to an area of the curriculum that's inadequately covered in available texts. If you're still searching for a topic, however, Tom March, who developed the first WebQuests with Bernie Dodge, suggests starting "where you're at." "If you have an area that's your specialty, something that thrills you to teach, that you know inside and out, up and down, begin there," March says. You can also explore March's Idea Machine, which provides 50 prompts designed to help begin the brainstorming process.
The Task. "The task," says Dodge, "is the single most important part of a WebQuest." His WebQuest Taskonomy: A Taxonomy of Tasks provides eleven different types of tasks, including journalistic, mystery, persuasion, and judgement tasks. If you can't find it here, you can't find it anywhere!
The Process. In this section, you'll include the roles students will assume and the steps they'll follow to complete the activity. March's Designing for Success provides not only a Designer's Checklist, but also some clickable "friendly advice" for the creatively challenged!
The Resources. Identify the online resources available on your topic by brainstorming a list of related words and using the list to search for relevant sites. As you search, create a hotlist of current, accurate, and age-appropriate sites that will engage your students' interest.
The Evaluation. As Kenton Letkeman points out, "Traditional evaluation techniques are not the best means for evaluating the results of WebQuests, since all students may not learn the same content. Individual evaluation rubrics should be developed that follow curriculum objectives and are easy for students to understand." Dodge's Rubric for Evaluating WebQuests also provides a number of criteria for evaluating students' WebQuest success.


http://www.educationworld.com/a_tech/tech/tech011.shtml