Week Thirteen

Don't know that I'll have any visitors this week, but the WebQuest is done! Or at least it is published...
I'm including the link as I would really appreciate any comments or suggetions that anyone wants to make.

http://questgarden.com/125/07/9/110423174439/

Thanks in advance!

Sheri

Week Twelve

I finally started building the actual website for my WebQuest, things were coming together fairly well; however, after talking to several classmates who were using the questgarden.org website template to build their WQ I decided to take a look. There are definitely some benefits to using the preset templates from questgarden instead of using a google site, so last night I started to move my data over from the google site to the questgarden site. I've put together several of the worksheets that will be available for the students to use. A form to organize the resources they have used and a form to allow them to keep the information they gather from each site.

I chose the Battle of Yorktown, the final key battle of the war, as the focus of the WQ. I felt that the students would be able to look back, if they choose to, and include information on events that directly supported the US in this battle. Other than inserting the information into the template, the only other task I still need to complete is to review the websites I am offering to the students as a resource to ensure that each has an adequate amount of information about the events that took place at Yorktown. I'm hopeful that I'll have the final touches on by Monday or Tuesday at the latest. I'm excited to see the final version!

Week Eleven

This week wasn't as productive as I had hoped it would be. I decided to back-up a little bit and take a look at the Social Studies text book that our school uses to see if there were any particular events that occured during the American Revolution that were particularly rich in content and meaning and that would be a good topic for my WQ. One of the reasons I selected social studies and the American Revolution in particular was that it is not an area of the curriculum that I know very much about. I was looking forward to learning as I go. While this was a noble idea, it really gets in the way of knowing what I'm doing. I've done some reading and gone back to review a number of the websites I had found a week ago, just looking for those sites that line up the best with information on various battles that I'm considering for the focus event of the WQ. Hopefully I'll have the event selected very soon.

In the meantime, I've started to build the Google website. Regardless of what the exact topic of the WQ is, the format of the website will be the same. Website development is going well. I've got the navigation bar complete and all of the pages to go along with the tabs have been created. I've got my "Introduction" page and "Teacher Page" completed and I'm working on the "Process" tab at the moment.

As I look at what I've accomplished and what I have still in front of me, I'm feeling like I'm in a pretty good place. This feeling has me a bit worried, as I'm afraid I'm overlooking something, but I think I'll just enjoy the sense of calm for the moment. Hopefully I'll have great things to report in my next posting!

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!