Webquest Explorin'

Today in Inst. Tech. we learned about webquests and how we can use them in the classroom to teach our students about a core learning standard in the curriculum. It can engage them in learning through simple, step-by-step tasks as individuals or in groups. We also had to participate in a webquest so as to know what it would feel like for the student. I participated in the Greek example that was posted. Out of the four jobs that were given--I was the cartographer. My job was to create the map about the countries and places that Odysseus visited throughout his journey.

We will be creating a webquest for an upcoming project. I decided to plan mine out for 3rd grade. I want to create a webquest that guides students to learning about culture and connecting it to themselves. They will understand how is shapes their community and learn how culture is important. I don't know exactly how I'm going to go about it just yet, but I'm still excited to do it. If I ever get the chance, I want actually want to assign it to my class. Culture is important to know about--it guides us to understand others along with their views and habits.

Educational Website Evaluation

Learning how to evaluate websites is very important. Through proper evaluations, you can determine whether or not the website(s) that you are using holds adequate information for your students. A lot of websites can be unreliable because they can be created by anyone and everything. Plus anything about anything can be put online. I think as teachers, we should also teach our students how to evaluate websites too--especially when citing/gathering information for research papers and projects.

I used the website called ReadWriteThink. For evaluation purposes, I used Berkeley Library and WAVE. It was created by IRA/NCTE in 2010. It's pretty recent. It benefits students and teachers in a variety of ways from interactive games and puzzles to links about learning and teaching with reading and writing for several different grades. It's really extensive with all of it's features--could come in real handy for lesson planning and research by teachers. I liked how the evaluating checklist--helped me to think about the purpose of and the information presented by the website. When I used WAVE to see what errors existed on the page, it only came up with 6; which aren't that big of a deal. That's pretty good odds.