by Tom March
- 1. Step & Fetch it - Is there a Right Answer? Is this a traditional lesson plan dressed up as a Web page? If the question / task involves the retrieval of a defined, known body of knowledge, this is not a WebQuest. WebQuests are use in ill-structured domains, places with lots of gray and little "black and white." The idea is for students to argue an opinion, not mumble back someone else's thinking.
- A BestWebQuest: Take Me on Vacation!
- 2. Hip Hop Homework -Is the true Task Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V? Similar to the "Step-and-and-Fetch-it" approach, Hip Hop Homework asks students to piece together information / answers from various sources. This is a step in the right direction, but it still doesn't ask students to do anything new (like interpret others' opinions). A WebQuest might ask students to gather information from different sources, but then prompts learners to transform this acquired knowledge into a new understanding.
- A BestWebQuest: Literary Fan Club
- 3. Anything Goes - Could it be done without instruction? Sometimes an online activity will challenge students to do something creative or to solve a problem. This is positive! The downfall to the "Anything Goes" approach, is that to complete the task, students don't have to draw from any of the previous instruction. The fix to this near WebQuest is to ask students to apply a set of criteria to their creation. Rather than write any play or poem, or problem-solve any solution, invoke criteria that require students to integrate the new learning into their product.
- A BestWebQuest: Influencing Your Photographic Eye
- 4. Tag Team PowerPoint - Do the roles stay separate? This is a common mistake that almost everyone has fallen into at some point. Students work together as teams and each member contributes, but their work stays in isolation from each other. Each member knows what he or she knows, but there's no group process that forces a synthesis of this wealth of knowledge. The classic example is where each team member is responsible for one slide in a presentation, one card in a stack, or one quadrant in a newsletter. It's not hard to take it that one extra step and have a true WebQuest out of all this time, effort and learning. And it's a shame not to.
- A BestWebQuest: Quest for Peace: An Internet WebQuest on Kashmir Peace Proposal Consensus
- 5. Slacker's Delight - Can one person do all the work? If an online activity prompts learners to construct new meaning, does this apply to all students in the group? Or is everyone happy if the bright kid does all the work? A killer WebQuest jigsaws the group process so that everyone must contribute. Even though some students' opinions might stand out in their group, the final task must involve everyone's participation in a substantial way. The way this could be a great WebQuest is if it is for use by only one learner. This would tend to be more advanced learners who can hold multiple perspectives in mind at once and evaluate them. Adults and gifted and talented students care good candidates for this approach.
- A BestWebQuest: Antarctica - An Issue for all Australians
- 6. Tunnel Vision -The 3 R's? (Real, Rich and Relevant) The next level of achievement in WebQuest design involves taking advantage of the contextual connections available through the Web. If you're studying The Lord of the Flies, go beyond Golding to street children in Algeria. When experimenting with the applied science of bottle rockets and catapults, discuss the ethics and efficacy of smart bombs. When researching early colonists from the Mayflower or First Fleet, update things to boat people and Globalization. Great WebQuests leverage the medium and the medium enables contextualizing the content to intrigue, perplex, and enrich.
- A BestWebQuest: 2030: Homesteading Mars
- 7. Ho-Hum - Are there Ah-Ha's & Assimilation? Whereas a Tunnel Vision approach doesn't access the wealth of the Web's contexts and juxtapositions, a Ho-Hum WebQuest may expose students to interesting contrasts and comparisons during the roles phase, but the final group process doesn't produce anything from this rich mixture and cognitive dissonance. When students struggle to assimilate new information and perspectives, they are creating new schema, achieving the cognitive ah-ha's that are the heart of transformative learning. By applying a new model, set of constraints, or varying the scenario, learners have the map of a conceptual pattern to help shape the development of new schema.
- A BestWebQuest: A Separate Peace: A Teenager Experiences World War II
Criteria for Assessing Best WebQuests
Source: http://bestwebquests.com/bwq/matrix.asp
| Low | Medium | High | |
| Engaging Opening / Writing | No attempt made to appeal to learners. | Honestly attempts to appeal to student interests. | Has that something that compels attention. |
| The Question / Task | No real Question and / or a fuzzy Task. Maybe what's asked for is lower level thinking or info retrieval. | There is at least an implicit Question and a Task that targets higher order thinking. All this may not be totally clear. | Clear Question and Task. These naturally flow from the introduction and signal a direction for sophisticated learning. |
| Background for Everyone | No attempt to access prior learning or build common background. | Some mention of addressing a common body of knowledge. (May not happen within the activity.) | Clearly calls attention to the need for a common foundation of knowledge and provides needed (Web?) resources. |
| Roles / Expertise | No Roles / use of perspectives or Roles are artificial and may lack inherent conflict of interest. | Roles are clear and realistic. They may be limited in scope, but do evoke conflict. | Roles match the issues and resources. The roles provide multiple perspectives from which to view the topic. |
| Use of the Web | This activity could probably be done without the Web. | Some resources reflect features of the Web that make it particularly useful such as images, audio, interactivity, current information, etc. | Uses the Web to access at least some of the following: interactivity, multiple perspectives, multimedia, current information, etc. |
| Transformative Thinking | No Transformative thinking. (This is not a WebQuest, but may be a good Knowledge Hunt). | Higher level thinking is required, but the process for students may not be clear. | Higher level thinking is required to construct new meaning. Scaffolding is provided to support student achievement. |
| Real World Feedback | No feedback loop included. | The learning product could easily be used for authentic assessment although this may not be addressed or it only happens in the classroom. | A feedback loop connecting learners to the Real world is included in the Web page and an evaluation rubric is probably provided (early on!). |
| Conclusion | Minimal conclusion. No mention of student thinking or symmetry to intro. | Returns to the intro ideas. May sum up the experiences and learning that was undertaken. | Clear tie-in to the intro. Makes the students' cognitive tasks overt and suggests how this learning could transfer to other domains/issues. Probably calls attention to the assumptions / hidden agendas inherent in the WebQuest itself. Sophistication keeps increasing. |
