Lesson Six

This week's lesson required creating a webquest. Fortunately, I used an immigration powerpoint with my students recently that was very heavy on interactives and actually linked to several terrific webquests. The one thing that I really wanted them to do was to write more. The powerpoint assignments were really more about exploration and video/sound/interactive quizzes. There was no real opportunity to get creative or apply what they had learned. This is why I decided that journaling would fit the bill perfectly.

As the students create a diary in the character of an immigrant coming to the United States for the first time, they can put themselves into someone else's life and what they have recently learned becomes real to them. Studies show that making learning apply to student's lives helps them remember information longer. When using QuestGarden to create the webquest, I really didn't like that there were three parts to the "process" section. I think it could have been better served with just one section. Also, there was no drag and drop for pictures from what I could tell. Yes, you could insert but not necessarily just where you wanted the image. In addition to these few little quirks, the actual formatting was limited unless you wanted to pay for the service. There are too many free web templates at oswd.org to ever pay for what you want. You can just tweak a template and upload it to your google account.

The good thing about Questgarden was that it gave you a great foundation for including all portions that are essential to a successful activity. The site walked you through the process, giving examples and advice all along the way. I definitely recommend using this free thirty day trial to create as many webquests as you can, after which you should be comfortable enough with the components to venture off on your own.

Feel free to browse my Immigration webquest and use it as you like! I plan on tweaking it in the weeks to come.