For my first learning tool exploration I decided to investigate WebQuest. WebQuest is a research tool to help teachers provide further instruction to their students. Students are directed to a WebQuest and follow the steps and links provided to complete a series of tasks. It seemed like the most likely tool to apply to the student’s in the intermediate level ISES (Intensive Social Emotional Support) classroom where I am currently a student teacher. I found one WebQuest lesson in particular that really seemed applicable called What is Respect and was one of 5,000 WebQuests that fit the parameters I set (grades 3-5, ELA lessons).
At first it seemed challenging to find ways to make it applicable to my students. I realized that that by switching the search requirements I could find more applicable material. Overall the WebQuest was very easy to use and I can see where it would be a very beneficial tool for the general education teachers. It covers a huge amount of topics and allows users to set up search requirements that make finding particular topics easy to do. I did not take the time to create my own WebQuest, but imagine that if I was a general education teacher that this would be something that I would be doing with relative ease.
I did discover some difficulties with using WebQest for my ISES students. First, was the very large amount of tasks. Most of the lessons I viewed had task pages that were very lengthy and required a lot of steps to reach completion. This is important because many of my students have very low work tolerance; I often modify their work to only show 2 or 3 problems at a time. Second, there were huge amounts of work required before the game breaks. Finally, is the writing task itself. My students are very easily frustrated with writing projects. Many of them are still working on things like correct letter formation and sentence structure. Although this is intended to be a self-guided research tool, I can see the benefits of modifying it to use it as a group activity, letting students come up to the computer and document camera area and letting them work on a task in front of the class and demonstrate their understanding of the lesson.
In general, the WebQuest was impressive. I can see where I would be able to modify it (for example, by selecting lower grade level material) that would improve its accessibility for my students.
In a previous class we worked on a WebQuest that had us walking through the various resources for teachers (Professional Development sites, etc.) I thought it was helpful to have the task clearly defined and extremely helpful to have the links available that directed users not just to the site but the exact location within the site to provide the required information. WebQuests work great for allowing students to take a deeper dive into a particular subject covered earlier in a unit of study.
The screenshot below is from the ‘What is Respect’ lesson that I found on WebQuest. It is the top of the task page.
WebQuest
EDTC 6431
Research Tool
Lewis is learning 