Week 4: WebQuesting

Comparing WebQuests

What’s a WebQuest? A WebQuest is an online project in which the teacher, having in mind a learning objective for the students, designs a Project-Based-Learning (PBL) [1] task to achieve a given learning goal. Now, understanding that a WebQuest should have a minimum of five steps [2]: the Introduction, the Task, the Process, the Evaluation, and the Conclusion, when you get to compare the WebQuests provided for evaluation (Los Angeles [3] and Energize our Planet [4]), you get to favor the second one much more than the first one.

Why does one get to favor the one by Santillana more? By comparing both WebQuests, the one found in OneStopEnglish (Los Angeles) lacks the five basic steps, and the other by Santillana (Energize our Planet) includes four of them. There is no doubt, structurewise, that the one produced by Santillana is way better than the other. And this statement or preference is attributed to the use of conventional stages already studied and proposed to get better results with these kinds of PBL tasks. The final product one can get with students can be severely affected and off-track; in other words, the learning objective cannot be met at all.

If I get to use any of the two WebQuests, I will definitely leave out the one about Los Angles or will rewrite it by using an online WebQuest template to always complete the design effectively in which each part is part of the final learning puzzle. The one created by Santillana just lacks the last step, so I guess the teacher can make a quick simple conclusion or wrap-up for the class. Santillana’s can be close to the underlying learning objective that triggered its creation. OneStopEnglish’s is not “strictly speaking” a real WebQuest.

If any teacher wants to venture his teaching into WebQuesting with his/her students, it is advisable to use user-friendly pages such as the following, which allows them to complete the five steps for this type of PBL task and guides them to have them really reflect the learning objective that motivated the creation of a WebQuest.

http://www.teach-nology.com/web_tools/rubrics/general/

http://webquest.sdsu.edu/templates/lesson-template1.htm

http://www.educationaltechnology.ca/resources/webquest/templates.php

For extra information on WebQuesting, visit the following links:

http://webquest.sdsu.edu/about_webquests.html

http://www.webquest.org/index-resources.php

http://www.webquest.org/index-create.php

To see a really nice example of a WebQuest, visit the following site:

http://zunal.com/webquest.php?w=73564

Jonathan

Universidad Latina

Costa Rica