6.3.4 :thinking about WebQuests

"For never was a story of more woe
 Than this of Juliet and her Romeo."
- William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 5.3

"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember.
I do and I understand."
— Confucius

The marriage between the overriding question of my Webquest ‘What drives the choices we make?’  and my experience in creating a WebQuest resulted into  the image and quotations above.

"A WebQuest," according to Bernie Dodge, the originator of the WebQuest concept, "is an inquiry-oriented activity in which most or all of the information used by learners is drawn from the Web. WebQuests are designed to allow learners focus on using information rather than on looking for it, and to support learners' thinking at the levels of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation."  

WebQuests give students a task that allows them to use their imagination and problem-solving skills. Communication, group work, problem solving, and critical and creative thinking skills are encouraged more than having students memorize predetermined content. The answers are not predefined and therefore must be discovered or created.

WebQuests allow students to explore issues and find their own answers particularly with controversial issues – My overriding question was ‘What drives the choices we make?’  Through a careful study of the characters in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the students were expected to process the information in meaningful ways and reach moral and ethical decisions guided by facts from the play and their life experiences.

Creating the WebQuest was a challenge to me in that I had to learn how to navigate the pages and also discover that I could use Microsoft Word to work my responses and copy and paste it to the Web Quest. In that manner I was able to save my data bundle, work better and smarter. WebQuests forces me to organise my information into manageable sections and also gives me the flexibility to work as I edit my work on the go.