Webquest.org

For this week Lisa and I are exploring the use of webquests in the classroom.  I first learned about webquests last week when I had to do complete a website review for my social studies in the elementary classroom class.  Webquest.org was one of the sites that my professor suggested that we looked into when completing our review.  While I was completing my review the different information that was available on these sites caught my eye and I wanted to learn more about it so that is why I choose to look more into webquests for this week. 

Webquests are basically online lessons designed by teachers for students to explore a topic more in depth on the internet on their own.  A webquest is set up so that it introduces a topic to the student, the student is then given a task to complete, and there are steps given to complete this task.  The teacher can also link word documents that they want the student to use and provides other web links for the students to explore. 

This great for the elementary classroom because children at this age don’t always have the skills they need to explore and research a topic on their own.  A webquest allows them to explore a topic but still have the freedom to look at different sites to gain the information needed like they would if they were doing research completely on their own.  I think webquests would be great to use during center time as a computer center or you could use webquests as an option to do when students finish other work early.

Even though here I mainly focused on how to use them in the elementary classroom webquests are created by teacher of all grades.  On the site you can search for what webquest that will work with a topic that you have in mind or create your own.  In a high school classroom you could even use these as an alternative homework assignment.  For more information about what makes a good webquest and to look at one looks like check out webquest.org.