Sharing on webquests
Webquests are a burgeoning field of teacher lesson plan sharing. There are multiple sites that cator to the online sharing-minded teacher: Questgarden.com; Zunal.com; and Teacherweb.com, to name a few. I used Questgarden to give webquesting a try. Here's my rendition:
http://questgarden.com/160/02/9/130607155643/credits.htm
The subject of my webquest was History as a Way of Knowing, that is, history as a facet of the theory of knowledge.
The topic is well-suited for a webquest in that it integrates multiple subject areas: history, literature, and art among others. The advantage of an integrated topic, in the world of webquests, is that it allows users to sample multiple media online and synthesize them into one coherent understanding that they can, in turn, use multiple media to present.
This is what I planned for the webquest. Students are asked to read some selections that take opposite views on history and then attempt to reconcile them according to the best principles of historiography. Then they start to develop the human interest aspects of history by listening to some audio and watching some video clips that dramatize historical events.
Lastly, they examine a set of famous historical photographs to start thinking about the role that other disciplines, like art, play in the acquisition and conveyance of historical knowledge. In the end, the students produce a Prezi presentation to pull it all together and discuss the human implications of the study of history.
On the critical side
The difficulty with using free web editors designed for teachers is that they have pretty rudimentary editing tools. They are fairly intuitive but they lack advanced photo editing features and layout options. There is not a lot of freedom to really design the webquest for aesthics. It gets the job done, but it’s a bit Commodore64, when it’s all laid out.
Another down side is the redundancy of the model GardenQuest uses for its webquests. There’s simply too much teacher-ese in the latter portions of the process. It seemed to me that teachers would regularly skimp on or leave out the teacher page portion of the webquest. The front-end user is likely to skip these aspects as well, jumping right into the bottom line, which is the student page. On that note, the Flesch-Kinkaide formula calculation that appears above the editing fields in QuestGarden is a bit bothersome. It purports to give the editor a “readability” factor based on the length of sentences, number of syllables, etc. Although the site’s explanation of the formula says to take it with “a grain of salt,” it’s hardly a necessary measure.I also found the “alerts” that QuestGarden tabs above the editing space a bit condescending. Most of the time it warns that the text formatting is too diverse, and it seems to miscalculate that number regularly. The best thing to do with those alerts is to ignore them and do what matches your own taste.
On the bright side
By far the best thing about QuestGarden is that it allows the teacher to plan ahead in a fun and interesting way and allows students direct access to that plan. Even more, it allows these lessons to be shared with other teachers to create a database of interactive lessons that both students and teachers can use to bring about learning. Teachers should be cautious not to let webquests become the next worksheet, though. They aren’t intended as fire-and-forget lessons that teachers use to keep students busy without actually engaging students in face-to-face dialogue.
Uses
The uses for webquests are self-evident. A webquest is a one-stop-shop for all the materials a teacher wants to pull together for a unit. I could see using these as unit-builders. They would seem to integrate well into LMS programs in which the various LMS tools could be linked in the webquest and vice versa. Teachers can borrow ideas from other teachers’ webquests or simply use one in its entirety (providing it’s been reviewed properly by the teacher and fits the class objectives).
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