May 7, 2009

Web Quests!

Posted in Uncategorized at 12:02 pm by britta09

OK, now that I am informed about what Web Quests are all about, I can start looking at individual web quests in order to evaluate them. To do this I randomly chose ‘The Presidents Quest’.

This WebQuest is designed for students in 9th or 10th grade and requires them to work in groups on the topics of Politics, Privileges and privacy, the First Ladies and ‘Special Cases’ of American Presidents. The aim for the class is that their ‘company’  develops the best journal containing a lot of information about the Presidents of the US in order to win a price of 10.000 $. So, in addition to the 4 groups there is also a special job for the Head editor, who organizes and motivates his fellow students and writes an article on his own. On the resources page the students find links to relevant pages for each group, except for the head editor, who has to rely on his own sources. Then there is also an evaluation page that gives hints to the requirements and a teacher’s page that explains the ‘didactical thoughts’ behind this WebQuest.

While I like the idea that the students are working together on a common goal that is not abstract, but a tangible product in the end, I have some problems with the differentiation of the groups. On the one hand it is positive that the students are able to choose a topic according to their interests but on the other it is stated that some are more complex than others which makes comparability and evaluation a bit difficult. The idea behind this is of course that each student should be given a task according to his or her abilities, but then the teacher would have to assign groups instead of letting them choose freely. The same applies for the special job of the head editor, which is designed for very good students. If there are such students in the class I would probably give them the opportunity to do an extra article on their own and give the responibility over the single groups to others, so that nobody would feel slighted.
As for the overall topic, which is of course intended to motivate the students, I think that the concept of a competition is well-meant but makes only sense if they are really competing against someone.

Still, apart from the criticism above, I think that this WebQuest would be a fun excercise for students and gives them the opportunity to improve not only their writing skills and the way they look for information in the web, but is also great for their social skills.

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