Week 12: WebQuest

What is a WebQuest?



"WebQuest," as defined by Tom March, circa 2003


"A WebQuest is a scaffolded learning structure that uses links to essential resources on the World Wide Web and an authentic task to motivate students’ investigation of a central, open-ended question, development of individual expertise and participation in a final group process that attempts to transform newly acquired information into a more sophisticated understanding. The best WebQuests do this in a way that inspires students to see richer thematic relationships, facilitate a contribution to the real world of learning and reflect on their own metacognitive processes."

THE WEBQUEST FORMULA

WebQuests, promote high-level thinking, develop problem-solving skills, and provide an avenue for seamlessly integrating technology into the curriculum. . According to Dodge, the six building blocks of a WebQuest are:

• The Introduction orients students and captures their interest.
• The Task describes the activity's end product.
• The Process explains strategies students should use to complete the task.
• The Resources are the Web sites students will use to complete the task.
• The Evaluation measures the results of the activity.
• The Conclusion sums up the activity and encourages students to reflect on its process and results.

ADVANTAGES:

• Internet sites are pre-selected so students don’t waste time searching.
• Students are lead to use higher level thinking to process information.
• Processing information helps avoid plagiarism.
• Makes efficient use of the net.
• Employs cooperative learning (students are in pairs or teams for most).
• Students will do real world research that is current and up-to-date.
• Scaffolding provided within the lesson can help lower learners catch up.
• Lessons are designed to motivate students by capturing their interest.

 DISADVANTAGES:

• Create one could take a lot of time.
• Broken links.
• Content often focused on Web resources, ignoring other library resources.
• Students can easily distracted by other things and not concentrate on activities.

In my personal opinion, I can say thtat this learning tool, is an interesting way to let students assimilate the information given by the teacher and analize it, to create their own knowledege and makes students to develop a critical thought. This learning tool offers students self pacing and self learning and allows them work individually or in groups.

WEBQUEST LINK:
http://platea.pntic.mec.es/erodri1/EJEMPLO1.htm

Week 10 Using Internet to improve Reading and Writing Skills

Well, this week I think it was a bit hard, becuase I had lots of information to read about and comment about it on Nicenet and then comment on my blog also comment in other classmetes blogs and make the task about the website I think is good for students. For me it was a lot of work to do, but after read the articles I think they are very interesting for us as students and as future teacher to learn how to teach reading and writing through the Internet and how to improve them with help of the interactive activities from the webpages that we can use as a teaching aid, to support our classes.

Week 10 "Task"

Well, I have explore the links that teacher Leti has send us and I found this a website very interesting to teach students reading and writing to improve their skills in these areas.

The website I worked on is:    http://www.manythings.org/    and the name of the page is "Interesting Things for ESL Sudents"

I think this page is useful to any student because it has a section for beginners students if it's the first time they visit the website and I think it is good for students at an elementary level of English or for High School students.

Finally, I think this site is appropriate for students as it has a wide range of interactive activities to work with, what is more this page will help students acquire new knowledge and improve their learning skills.

Week 8 "Delicious"

Well, this week I have upload a profile picture and store some links more on delicious. I think this tool allows us to share with other people our links. This week I have read some information about delicious and in this page we can organize our links by stacks this is a easy way to organize our links into fields or main topics.

Social Bookmarking "Delicious"

Well, this week I felt a little confused because I did not know how to create a delicious account even how to save the links on this site, so I had to ask a partner to help me create one and explain to me how to save the links. I think this social marker will be useful for us to store our most important educational websites to share with our students and others.

Wikis

Well,this week I felt a bit stressed and confused, because I did not understand anything about Wikis but finally I got it. Also, I have learnt, what is Wikispaces and what it is used for. I think it is also an interesting tool for academic purposes, because we can share and discuss information and get opinions from other people. As future teacher I can consider these websites (Nicenet and Wikispaces) as educational tools to have a class with our students to let them involve into the class, it also can be useful to expand Students' knowledge.

Week 5 Search Engines

This week I have read the webites that teacher Leti has suggested us about search engines. I took a look to the information and I found very  interesting. I used these search engines to look for information I need to do a homework. Also, I found them very helpful becuase I can use these search engines as a future English teacher to find relaible information that will be useful for academic and personal purposes.

Week 3 how to create a Blog

In this course, I have learnt how to create a blog, but I must say this is the first time I create a blog and to me it was a little difficult to do.

I think this is a good way to share our ideas about any topic and discuss about them with our classmates, also this is a good language learning tool.

Week 4 ABCD Objectives

 In this week I have learnt how to write objectives correctly using the ABCD method (Audience, Behavior, Condition and Degree of Mastery), and I have to say that for me it was a little hard to do and understand everything that it implies, but finally I understood it. And, I think that this is going to be a very useful tool for me in the future as an English teacher to design good lesson plans to teach a better class and make it easy and interesting for my students.