Week Ten

This has been an interesting week. I really started to dig in on the WebQuest. There are plenty of websites that address content related to the American Revolution, but I wanted to find something a bit different. I found about six sites that I really liked. The content from these sites seems to be presented from a neutral position and were from reliable sources. I spent some time trying to dig a little bit deeper. I found that the National Archives have a digital library with copies of documents from the American Revolution. I'm not sure that the documents I found will necessairly tie into the WQ, but there is something unique and special about seeing and even reading the actual documents from the AR. I'll know by the end of this week if I can find a way to use this resource. If not, I'll need to come up with a few more websites, but I'm well on my way.

I spent some time this week trying to determine how to select what event or angle of the American Revolution I want to make the focus of my WebQuest. I toyed with the idea of presenting enough events to allow each team to select an independent event to focus on. After exchanging a few e-mails with my professor, I've decided that for now, I'm going to stick to one event and have each team do the exact same assignment. There were a couple of reasons I made this decision. First, creating 7 events for the 7 teams to focus on would require that each team have equal resources, which could be very time consuming for me. I hadn't considered that it would be close to the amount of work that would be required to create 7 individual WebQuests. The second reason was that I think grading 7 different teams on different events would be difficult. So for now, I'll stick to one topic and once I've had a chance to teach and grade the WQ, I can decide if it would be appropriate to expand it to include the other topics for future years.

Now that I know a bit more about how I'm going to proceed, I've started developing the guidelines for the articles that will be part of the WQ. How many sentences, how many resources they must use, and what types of pictures will be used. I've started to work on graphic organizers for each article style. I received a suggestion to include advertisements or classified ads to the list of articles I was considering and I am going to do just that. I like that it will require students to take the information that they've learned and use it in a fun and creative way. I've also decided to use a google website as the platform for the project. I found the google sites to be easy to use and I think I can do everything I want to do with this type of site.

This should be a very productive week as the pieces begin to come together!