WebQuests

When I first started teaching 7th & 8th grade Language Arts at Quirk Middle in Hartford, It was 2002 and there was little to no technology available for teachers to integrate into their curriculum. The three computer labs in the building was all we really had to work with. I was teaching a poetry unit at the time that also included lyrics to popular Motown songs and designed an on-line scavenger hunt for the students that only included 2 different websites that they'd need to browse through in order to find the facts that would answer their questions. In 2002 I had never heard of a WebQuest before and was just trying to get through my first year of teaching while still keeping my 118 bouncy-ball students engaged and learning. Even without knowing much about the educational design and what specific standards I was hitting, I think I did a pretty good job back then considering the lack of tools I had at my disposal. Even setting up the lab back in '02 meant coming in an hour early just to make sure that all the computers were working, and had the 2 websites I needed bookmarked on each computer.....(I could go on and on)

Now that I've built a few WebQuests and studied up more on their power and uses, I can see how developments and improvements over the past decade on the web and with the new Web 2.0 tools, how WebQuests can incorporate more research and relevant information in a more streamlined manner. If Custom Search Engines were around when I built my website scavenger hunt assignment back in the day, I would have had a much easier time providing a path for the students to follow as they worked through their questions. CSEs are the perfect fit for webquests because of the control you have when building the CSE and what its capabilities will be for the student. While reading So Far From the Bamboo Grove (a novel about a Japanese family stuck in North Korea after WWII & their journey to make it back to Japan safely) I was using Google Earth quite frequently to zoom in from space to the North Korea, South Korea, Japan area to show them what the landscapes looked like in Nannam compared to Seoul and Pusan. I didn't see many actual photos thumb-tacked down on the maps to look at, but just being able to zoom down and in on the Imjon river and where it crosses the 38th parallel gives the kids that visual some of them so baldy crave now, so with those types of pictures, photos and sometimes even video available, WebQuests don't have to be just a simple journey down a pre-blazed digital trail. 

My students have already completed on a map/timeline of the family's journey back to Japan that has a 'travel line' with numbers along the line that explain important events that happened along the way. By using Google Earth with them now, they can go back to those actual places in North Korea, South Korea, Japan on Google Earth and create their own travel logs online with coordinates of where they think the certain events happen based on information they get from the book. They could even go out looking for pictures of certain cities, landmarks and important locations in North Korea, South Korea, Japan to help make the journey more real to them. If this assignment was done in a step by step process as the reading groups progressed through the book, I think it would have more of an impact as well as rope in some of the more reluctant readers right from the start.