Week 5 - Beginning of the Week
The topic of this week for our course is "Project-Based Learning, Webquests and Rubrics".
Project-based learning I've done a lot, rubrics I am quite familiar with but although I know what webquests are, I have never used these in class and until now had never created one. So I took it upon myself to create my first webquest today.
A webquest is a quest on the web. A quest is a search or pursuit in order to find something. It comes from the old French queste (origin of the word "question"), from M.L. questa which is an alteration of the Latin quæsitus which is the pp of quærere which in its turn is the source for "query" and this, in the end, became "inquiry".
A webquest is an inquiry oriented online tool for learning. It is an interactive lesson in which most or all of the information that students explore and evaluate comes from the world wide web. The concept of a webquest was first introduced by Bernie Dodge in 1995.
Webquests:
- can be as short as a single class period or as long as a month-long unit;
- sometimes involve group work, with division of labor among students who take on specific roles or perspectives;
- are built around resources that are preselected by the teacher. Students spend their time USING information, not LOOKING for it.
Learn more about Webquests here.
I used the webquest creator site http://zunal.com to create my webquest. This site is extremely user friendly and intuitive. The only downside of the site is that one can only create ONE webquest for free. :-(
I decided to use an article I had written a long time ago as the base for my webquest. In the article, I explored the origin of the expression "before you can say Jack Robinson".
So without further ado, here my very first webquest:
Who was Jack Robinson?
I hope you'll like it!
As a kid, I was a big Dodger baseball fan, and Jackie Robinson - the baseball player - was one of my heroes, even though he had died before I was born.
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