This past Thursday and Friday I tried my first mini-WebQuest with my students. I chose a short, well defined quest to experiment with the abilities and willingness of my students. After reserving the computer labs (during 3 classes one lab was available, for the other 2 I had to use another). I had a few problems with students not knowing their passwords(even after over 140 days of school) and some with students not being willing to read the recommended materials. The other little issue was getting students to type in the desired web page correctly. Many students wanted the answers to be blatant, not ones they had to read and think about.
Even with these few minor glitches, things seemed to go very well. The majority of the questions that were asked related directly to the topic and showed that students were interested in what they were learning. I talked with our librarian who is willing to add links to the library home page so students can simply click instead of typing, passwords are now written down and the necessary pages open to student access.
Of course, there are those students that really don't read much and get done way too fast, those that read and work at a steady pace and those that read very deliberately, taking much more time than anticipated. Bringing these three groups of student together was taken care of by having a large bank of pictures of the topic, which was eclipses. Not only did these available pictures help to keep some of the faster students on topic and busy, seeing the pictures spawned many discussions and questions.
Students talked to each other about what they were finding and were excited for the most part. My answering of the questions was limited, as each picture had a caption and some explanation. Most of the other questions were in the material that students were to have already read, so students were generally sent back to the reading for the answers. The questions that weren't in the reading, I took care of while referencing their worksheets to expand on a topic. All went pretty smoothly. Monday morning I intend to get student reactions/suggestions and see what they thought.
Thanks to this class, I've really officially tried my first quest. Next year I'll start early in the year and build the students' skills to more complex quests with fewer bounds...which will again change my year. At least I'm not stagnating at this point!
3 comments:
Bravo! I am glad to hear it went so well. My initial experiences mirror yours as the visual component was instrumental in keeping the students' attention. The interchange of information and ideas between the students was a desired outcome. I also saw what you described regarding the reluctance by some to read completely. Of course that happens regardless of whether it is assigned from a book, magazine, or computer! It is exciting to hear of your success and anytime you can add a new "tool" to your box, it is a good thing.
That's great to know you've tried this! And thanks for letting us know of the "glitches" involved. That'll give me some things to think about before I do my first quest, probably next year. Though, your comments about students not reading the recommended materials, and some going too quickly while others work too slowly, are problems that most teachers (well, me, at least) face regularly. They are also not used to having to think about answers, to process and come up with an individual reponse instead of regurgitating what they've read. Bravo to you for challenging students with that. The more they are asked to think, the better they'll get at it!
Let us know what they thought of it.
Thanks Mark for sharing! I don't think any one of us here has NOT experienced technical difficulties at some point or another when using technology with our students. As I'm reading more and seeing examples of webquests, it's certainly something I would like to do in the near future with my students. Since I have elementary, I would have to go through a lot of keyboarding skills prior to an assignment like this (i.e. typing in websites, bookmarking, surfing the web for info, etc).
I really enjoyed learning how to do video captures last week, and there are definitely possibilities for using them more often as a teaching tool. This is especially true, as most of my students are visual, hands-on learners. When they tried out a new program last week, they just followed along what I said and showed on my video capture that was displayed via our LCD projector.
Post a Comment