Sunday, August 4, 2013

Week 6 WebQuests


Webquest Evaluation

My ultimate goal is to teach elementary special needs children.  It was easy to find really good webquests that fit my goal, but I wanted to find one that had both good areas and not so good areas that I could critique.  That being said, I found a Webquest entitled “Special Education Rocks” with the URL:


This webquest was written to give parents and teachers resources to find age appropriate material for use with special needs children.  The look of the webquest is first rate.  The clip art and form of the webquest looks very professional and the color palate is very pleasing.  I had high hopes for this webquest based on that, but other sections really ruined what started out as a good webquest.  I noticed several typos in this webquest and while not horrible it does take away from the webquest. While the task of this webquest was to inform parents and teachers, the process of the webquest goes off on a tangent and really missed the mark.  The one main link of the process section is broken and leaves the user with no option for doing the process.  Without direction in the process the evaluation rubric is hard to apply to the results. 

Overall, this webquest starts out with a bang but comes up short on material.  With a few fixes and a little clearer goal I think it could be a great webquest.

My Webquest Experience

This week we read about and worked on our first webquest.  Which is remarkable since seven days ago I had never heard of a webquest.   In that short seven days I have reviewed, read, and created my own.  At first I was intimidated with creating a webquest and found it difficult at first to generate a topic that I wanted to teach in the webquest format.  After looking through the examples I soon discovered you can really teach any topic in webquest if you format the information and ask the right questions to provoke a child’s learning.

As an avid runner, fitness and health are important to me and I wanted to incorporate my hobby into a lesson.  But instead of just a boring lesson on jogging or running I wanted to keep the targeted audience (middle school students) interested and put a technology/ smart phone twist on the lesson. 

For my Webquest I used the website www.Questgarden.com.  Questgarden supplies templates that enable you to fill information into fields and choose text and background colors.  This makes for easier and faster webquest building.  I signed up for the free trial but with a paid subscription you have access to more background choices.  A subscription only costs $20 for 2 years, so it is very reasonable.  I plan to use webquests in my classroom.

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