Kathy Schrock's Web Quest Page

Bernie Dodge must be the Web Quest Idol, because he has been cited in both articles I have read tonight! With education always on the constant move, school districts are always playing "catch up" with meeting the standards and requiring more and more from their teachers and students without ever extending the school day. This reminder always boggles my mind. How can we ever be expected to fit it all in, especially in a way that will be effective and meaningful to our students? I appreciated Tom March's quote that web quests "bring together the most effective instructional practices into one integrated student activity." Just like our teaching, we strive to tie in our lessons with real world problems and situations, so that learning is more hands on and realistic. It is also important to instill some prior knowledge with our students before letting them go and work collaboratively. This step is extremely important for web quests as well. I do a math project with my students every year that relates multiplication to the visual representation of an array (adopted by Marilyn Burns). They are all proposed a problem by a fictional candy designer about creating a new candy box design that can fit a certain amount of candy. They are presented the problem, and then as a group they have to come up with several possible candy box creations and actually construct their designs using graph paper. I can see already that I use some of the ideas proposed to the design of a web quest, but now I need to incorporate the use of technology and the Internet for group collaboration. I can't wait to get started!!