WEBQUEST

1. What is a WebQuest?
A WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented online tool for learning, says workshop expert Bernie Dodge 1. This means it is a classroom-based lesson in which most or all of the information that students explore and evaluate comes from the World Wide Web. Beyond that, WebQuests:
can be as short as a single class period or as long as a month-long unit;
usually (though not always) involve group work, with division of labor among students who take on specific roles or perspectives;
are built around resources that are preselected by the teacher. Students spend their time USING information, not LOOKING for it.
(Source: http://www.thirteen.org/edonline/concept2class/webquests/index.html)

2. What are the essential components of a WebQuest?
There are six critical components in a WebQuest:
Introduction:
The introduction section provides background information and motivational scenarios like giving students roles to play: "You are an underwater research scientist," or "You are an astronaut planning a trip to the moon." It also provides an overview of the learning goals to students.
Task:The task is a formal description of what students will have accomplished by the end of the WebQuest.

Process:This is a description of the steps learners should go through in accomplishing the task, with links embedded in each step.

Resources:This section of the WebQuest consists of a list of the resources (bookmarked Web sites, print resources, etc.) that your students will need to complete the task.

Evaluation:Each WebQuest needs a rubric 1 for evaluating students' work. The standards should be fair, clear, consistent, and specific to the tasks set. Many of the theories of assessment, standards, and constructivism apply to WebQuests: clear goals, matching assessments to specific tasks, and involving the learners in the process of evaluation are all concepts from earlier workshops that apply here.
Conclusion:This step allows for reflection by the students and summation by the teacher. Setting aside time for discussion of possible extensions and applications of the lesson honors the constructivist principle: "We learn by doing -- but we learn even better by talking about what we did." During the concluding section of a WebQuest, you can encourage your students to suggest ways of doing things differently to improve the lesson.

Source: (http://www.thirteen.org/edonline/concept2class/webquests/index.html)

3. What do short-term and long-term WebQuest focus?

Short Term WebQuests

The instructional goal of a short term WebQuest is knowledge acquisition and integration, described as Dimension 2 in Marzano's (1992) Dimensions of Thinking model. At the end of a short term WebQuest, a learner will have grappled with a significant amount of new information and made sense of it.

Longer Term WebQuest

The instructional goal of a longer term WebQuest is what Marzano calls Dimension 3: extending and refining knowledge.A longer term WebQuest will typically take between one week and a month in a classroom setting.

(Some Thoughts About WebQuests
Bernie Dodge, San Diego State University )
( http://webquest.sdsu.edu/about_webquests.html )

4. What are the benefits of the WebQuest?

When predictions are made about life and work for the coming decades, there are a few points on which there is nearly universal agreement:
Tomorrow's workers will need to be able to work in teams.
Individuals will move through several careers in the course of a lifetime.
The issues facing citizens will become more and more complex, and societal problems will resist easy fixes or black-and-white categorization.
The amount of information available to everyone will grow at an accelerating pace; much of it will come directly from a growing number of sources without filtering or verification.
What this means is that tomorrow's workers and citizens will need to be able to grapple with ambiguity. They will need to commit themselves to a lifelong process of learning, honoring multiple perspectives and evaluating information before acting on it. Tomorrow's workers and citizens are sitting in our classrooms today.
Using WebQuests in our classrooms can help build a solid foundation that prepares them for the future.
(http://www.thirteen.org/edonline/concept2class/webquests/index_sub1.html )

5. How to create WebQuest?

Here are the recommended steps:

1. The first stage for a teacher in learning to be a WebQuest designer is to become familiar with the resources available on-line in their own content area. Toward that end, we've prepared a Catalog of Catalogs of Web Sites for Teachers. This provides short list of starting points for exploration broken down by subject matter discipline.
2. The next step is to organize one's knowledge of what's out there. Spending a few hours on Non-WebQuest 3 will guide the teacher in organizing the resources in their discipline into categories like searchable database, reference material, project ideas, etc.
3. Following that, teachers should identify topics that fit in with their curriculum and for which there are appropriate materials on-line.
4. A template is available that guides the teacher through the process of creating a short-term, single discipline WebQuest.
(Some Thoughts About WebQuests
Bernie Dodge, San Diego State University )
(http://webquest.sdsu.edu/about_webquests.html)