WebQuest Points to Ponder

The seven steps to creating a webquest are:

1. Pick a fruitful topic and goal that…
1. Is based on important curriculum standard
2. Makes appropriate use of the web. Use of the web in your project should bring in primary sources and other “cognitive hooks” that would not ordinarily be available to schools.
3. Is a topic you’re not satisfied with.
4. Requires a level of understanding—NOT just rote learning. Choose content and standards that invite creativity, that have multiple layers, can have multiple interpretations or be seen from multiple perspectives. In short, pick material that requires students to transform what they have seen into something different.

2. Select a task that engages higher level thinking—use a taskonomy.

TASK	Require students to…
RETELLING: asking students to absorb some information and then demonstrate that they've understood it. However, this type of task could be used as an interim step to develop background understanding of a topic in combination with one of the other, more complex and demanding task types.	prove that the format and wording of their report is significantly different than what they read (i.e., the report wasn't produced by cutting and pasting); make use of limited freedom about what to report and how to organize their findings; demonstrate that they can summarize a topic, distill the most important concepts, and elaborate upon their understanding .
COMPILATION: having students take information from a number of sources and put it into a common format. The resulting compilation might be published on the Web, or it might be some tangible non-digital product. This task familiarizes students with a body of content and provides them with practice in making selection choices and explaining them, as well as organizing, chunking, and paraphrasing information drawn from a variety of sources in a variety of forms. There needs to be some transformation of the information compiled. Simply putting a hotlist of web sites or a collection of web images together arbitrarily isn't enough.	use information resources that are in different formats, and require that they be rewritten or reformatted to create the compilation; set standards for the organization of the compilation, but don't make all the organization and formatting decisions for the students. Leave some of that job for them, and evaluate their product based on the consistency and reasonableness of the organization they come up with; develop their own criteria for selecting the items they put together and to articulate their criteria.
SOLVING A MYSTERY: wrap a topic in a puzzle or detective story. A well-designed mystery task requires synthesis of information from a variety of sources. Create a puzzle that cannot be solved simply by finding the answer on a particular page. If there are careers related to your topic which involve genuine puzzle-solving (as in what historians, scholars, archaeologists and other scientists do) then wrap the mystery around such people and the contrived nature of the mystery will be minimized.	absorb information from multiple sources put information together by making inferences or generalizations across several information sources; eliminate false trails that might seem to be likely answers at first but which fall apart under closer examination.
JOURNALISTIC APPROACH: there is a specific event at the core of what you want your students to learn. This task asks your learners to act like reporters covering the event. The task involves gathering facts and organizing them into an account within the usual genres of news and feature writing. In evaluating how they do, accuracy is important and creativity is not.	maximize accuracy by using multiple accounts of an event; to broaden their understanding by incorporating divergent opinions into their account; deepen their understanding by using background information sources; examine their own biases and minimize their impact on their writing.
DESIGN: requires learners to create a product or plan of action that accomplishes a pre-determined goal and works within specified constraints. Asking students to design an ideal (whatever it is your asking them to design) without also requiring them to work within a budget and within a body of legal and other restrictions doesn't really teach much. In fact, an unconstrained design task teaches an illusory "anything goes" attitude that doesn't map well onto the real world.	describe a product that is genuinely needed somewhere by someone; describe resource and other constraints that are not unlike those faced by real designers of such products; leave room for and encourages creativity within those constraints.
CREATIVE PRODUCT: requires pupils to recast what they have learned in the form of a song, story, poem or painting. Like engineers and designers, creative artists work within the constraints of their particular genre. Creative WebQuest tasks lead to the production of something within a given format (e.g. painting, play, skit, poster, game, simulated diary or song) but they are much more open-ended and unpredictable than design tasks. The evaluation criteria for these tasks would emphasize creativity and self-expression, as well as criteria specific to the chosen genre. Balanced against the constraints, a task of this type should invite creativity by being somewhat open-ended. There should be enough wiggle room in the assignment that a student or group of students will be able to leave a unique stamp on what you're asking them to do.	verify the historical accuracy of their content; adhere to a particular artistic style; use of the conventions of a particular format; demonstrate internal consistency; follow guidelines or limitations on length, size, or scope.
CONSENSUS BUILDING: requires students to deal with topics go hand in hand with controversy. People disagree because of differences in their value systems, in what they accept as factually correct, in what they've been exposed to, or in what their ultimate goals are. Consensus building tasks attempt to find a way to resolve differences of opinion, a major life skill. The essence of a consensus building task is the requirement that differing viewpoints be articulated, considered, and accomodated where possible. For better or worse, current events and recent history provide many opportunities for practice.	take on different perspectives by studying different sets of resources; explore issues based on authentic differences of opinion that are actually expressed by someone somewhere outside of classroom walls; develop a common report that has a specific audience (real or simulated) and is created in a format that is analogous to one used in the world outside classroom walls (e.g., a policy white paper, a recommendation to some government body, a memorandum of understanding).
PERSUASION: requires students to develop a convincing case that is based on what they've learned. Persuasion tasks might include presenting at a mock city council hearing or a trial, writing a letter, editorial or press release, or producing a poster or videotaped ad designed to sway opinions. Persuasion tasks are often combined with consensus building tasks, although not always. The key difference is that with persuasion tasks, students work on convincing an external audience of a particular point of view, as opposed to the persuasion and accomodation that occurs internally in a consensus building task.	deliver a message or series of key points about an issue to an audience that disagrees with the assigned point/topic or is otherwise apathetic
SELF-KNOWLEDGE: requires the learner to answer questions about themselves that have no short answers	outline their long term goals; clarify their stand on a series of ethical and moral issues; describe how they will go about constructing a self-improvement plan
ANALYZING: require students to explain how things hang together, and how things within a topic relate to each other. An analytical task provides a venue for developing such knowledge. In analytical tasks, learners are asked to look closely at one or more things and to find similarities and differences, to figure out the implications for those similarities and differences. They might look for relationships of cause and effect among variables and be asked to discuss their meaning.	go beyond simple analysis of similarities and differences to the implications of what is found speculate or infer what the differences and similarities between the two items, concepts, or issues mean.
JUDGMENT: requires a degree of understanding of that something as well as an understanding of some system of judging worth. Judgment tasks present a number of items to the learner and ask them to rank or rate them, or to make an informed decision among a limited number of choices.	explain and defend their system of evaluation provide a rubric or other set of criteria for making the judgment
SCIENTIFIC: require students to demonstrate an understanding of how science works in terms of a given process or issue. The Web brings both historical and up-to-the-minute data to our doors, and some of it can provide practice at doing real science. The Web brings both historical and up-to-the-minute data to our doors, and some of it can provide practice at doing real science.	make hypotheses based on an understanding of background information provided by on- or off-line sources; testi the hypotheses by gathering data from pre-selected sources; determine whether the hypotheses were supported and describing the results and their implications in the standard form of a scientific report

3. Start creating the web site. You can do this by making a Microsoft Word document and choosing to SAVE AS a web page that can be UPLOADED to the Internet.
4. Develop an evaluation—make a rubric detailing how the assignment will be graded.
5. Flesh out the process
1. Think about your learners.
2. Think about your topic.
3. Decide on the roles and responsibilities that you will assign to your students.
4. This is where the web sites you have chosen will be put to use.
5. Answer these questions and check off those statements that are true of your project…

If this is true...	then consider doing this in the design of your process:
There are established, conflicting opinions about your topic for which web or print resources can be found	Assign roles that are tied to those points of view. Give each learner access to resources that help them understand and internalize one of those viewpoints.
Among adults, there are specialists who look at your topic from complementary viewpoints and pool their expertise	Assign roles that are tied to those specializations. (e.g., photographer, journalist, historian)
Your learners are mature and experienced at working cooperatively	Let them practice managing their division of tasks by not pre-assigning them to roles.
The topic is complex and somewhat unfamiliar to your learners	Provide a set of common resources that everyone reads so that all learners have the same starting point in their understanding before taking on more specific roles or perspectives.
Your learners have done enough independent work that they are able to identify resources appropriate to answer a given question	Instead of assigning specific resources to a role, provide a common pool of resources and let them choose from among them.
There are subtasks to be performed that may not be familiar to all learners	Provide guides that help them perform the subtask (e.g., brainstorming, cropping images, etc.)
Your learners are articulate and mature enough to hammer out consensus among opposing points of view without your being present at all times	Divide your class into several small groups that contain divergent points of view. You float from group to group as needed to coach them toward synthesis.
Your learners are not articulate and mature enough to hammer out consensus among opposing points of without your being present at all times.	Divide your class into groups that each report on a single point of view, and guide the discussion in a whole class session so that synthesis occurs with your help.

6. Write documentation (for other teachers).
7. Test it and revise as needed.