WebQuest Focus

The article explains that WebQuest is a great tool when created and used properly in the classroom. There are five guiding principles to creating a good WebQuest: Find great sites, Orchestrate your learners and resources, Challenge your learners to think, Use the medium, Scaffold high expectations (FOCUS).

I really enjoyed reading the WebQuest focus article, and believe it will be very useful when trying to create my own WebQuest. My favorite section of the article is Use the medium because it contains some great suggestions for how to use the internet. If my students are learning about ocean life, I like the idea of putting live footage of sea otters, or dolphins some kind of aquarium/zoo cam on the page. Another idea I liked was using conversation; allowing students to post their comments and findings, or opening the WebQuest up to other classrooms and having even larger discussions. An additional thing I took away from this article is, it is important to have the students do something with the information instead of just paraphrase the information. I want my students to go beyond just retelling the information. I want them to be creative, use their problem solving skills, and have an opinion about things they read on the internet.