Description and evaluation of a WebQuest

This week I chose to focus on the description and evaluation of a WebQuest. I have been watching my daughter do WebQuests all summer during her High School Chemistry class. I have looked through many of them and some have been better than others. A couple have been regurgitating information while others have pushed her to think, evaluate and analyze.

I have been teaching Language Arts and Reading for the last five years and wanted to see if there were any good WebQuests for LA/Reading. I have come to the conclusion that most of the WebQuests seem to be designed for science and social studies with some math thrown in for good measure. Some of the LA/reading WebQuests are really social studies/history lessons in disguise. They ultimately get the students to think and learn about a different time and what it would be like to live there and how it differs from today’s society.

I chose to evaluate a WebQuest about the middle ages: http://www.iwebquest.com/middleages/Default.htm
The end product is a story that will teach your peers about the middle ages. Basically it is an historical fiction Webquest. I am all for teaching the students how to write historical fiction and this web quest does a poor job of getting the students prepared for the task at hand. Besides that many of the links were broken I was looking at the over all setup of the task rather than all of the elements involved. The students were going to have to perform their story since many people in the middle ages were not able to read or write. I felt that the focus of the Webquest was on this aspect more than the content involved. I thought one of the purposes of a WebQuest was to give the students all of the resources they needed rather than have them search blindly on the web.

One of the parts of this web quest is to create a multimedia presentation of their story. I felt that this web quest did not give the students material to learn about the middle ages to be able to write a good historical fiction story. It became more of a drama project than a history/writing endeavor.

I was disappointed after initially thinking this may be a good way to teach historical fiction writing.

I guess the idea of an inquiry based quest for reading has to involve some history to have the students be able to evaluate and compare/contrast today’s society. But it does seem that Webquests work best for Social studies and science to have students learn about a subject (like volcanoes or Rome) and then use their own ability to evaluate and synthesis information to discover how and why civilizations thrived and died and what the earth might look like without volcanoes erupting.