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Wednesday November 29, 2006 A web quest, according to Bernie Dodge, "is an inquiry-oriented activity in which most or all of the information used by learners is drawn from the Web. Web Quests 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." In other words, it is a kicked up version of the traditional research paper.
Don't get me wrong, I love research papers. As an English teacher, especially an eighth grade one, I feel that it is part of my professional responsibility to teach my students the proper way to research and compile facts in a logically organized fashion. The problem is that most eighth grade students fall way short in their knowledge of how to find information on given topics. I have struggled for many years in how to get students to go beyond printing out acres of paper in their quest for information. I had yet to come up with a viable solution until I read about web quests.
Dodge puts it best when he states "By doing part of the work for students, we allow them to go beyond what they would be able to do alone. Over time, we hope, they internalize the structures we provide until they can work autonomously" This is what it is all about, teaching students the skills necessary to succeed so that they can do the work by themselves. Sometimes this takes more than we had planned which is why I try to incorporate research into various lessons throughout the year.
There are six parts to a web quest: an introduction, task, process, set of resources, evaluation, and conclusion. Deciding on the task is easy. There are several avenues that you can pursue. One that I think would work well for research purposes is the journalistic task. In this task, students are asked to gather facts and organize them into an account within the usual genres of news and feature writing. In evaluating how they do, accuracy is important and creativity is not. This is a key point, that accuracy is more important than creativity. Teaching students to use facts and data to back up their opinions is more difficult to me than letting them loose with their creativity.
A good web quest takes a while to put together because the teacher needs to find the resources. As Dodge states, you need to find web sites that are readable and interesting, reliable and accurate, and come from sources that students wouldn?t normally encounter at school-no yahooligans. A great site that I plan to use is the Webcrawler. This is the best search engine that I have ever used
Since I already have a research project that I do for the Holocaust, my first web quest will be focused on this topic. Students will be given the task of finding out background information about the Holocaust. They will be asked to explain what happened during the Holocaust to Anne and others like her. A big part of their project will focus on the power of propaganda. This background information will help them connect to her story once we read it.
Web quests are a great way to teach students how to search out accurate facts. I have chosen to try the journalistic task approach, but there are many others that are applicable to my setting as well. Once I have designed a web quest, the possibilities are endless. The best part is that after having done several web quests, the dreaded research paper will no longer cast a shadow over the last grading period of their middle school years.