WebQuest: Adaptations

I really enjoyed making the WebQuest, but you were right when you said that the hardest part is the planning and time blocking. I had never really understood what WebQuests were even though I had always heard about them, and I really like the idea behind it. I like the part where you find all the websites and narrow down which ones work for your topic. I had so much fun going through all the creature features myself.  I realize that if you are interested in your topic and finding pertinent materials, your students will be interested as well. 

My strengths on this assignment were definitely the variety of resources and animals I included, the poster idea, and my attempt to remind students of prior knowledge. I had so much fun making that poster! I think students will too. I also think I did a good job including the vocabulary sheet that can help students throughout their research.  Some areas I need to work on are building in greater scaffolding for lessons and revising the rubric. This was the first rubric I’ve ever made, so I have to give myself that. I’ve learned that they are HARD to make. I need to incorporate categories that are easy for children to understand. I also need to create an additional rubric for ME to grade the students’ projects, not just the ones the students are using to self evaluate one another. The last thing I intend to tweak on my next WebQuest is how I start and end my lessons. I need to come up with something other than, “come to a stopping point, we’ll continue this tomorrow.” That’s too weak. I also can’t start day 2 of the WebQuest by saying, “pick up where you left off yesterday,” I think I need to build in a little more prior knowledge activity there.

Overall, I am proud of myself for improving the assessment part of this assignment. I finally figured out what you were looking for in terms of having each assessment address a particular objective. I’m also proud that I picked an interesting topic that I think kids will really like. The time planning was definitely the hardest part, its hard to determine how many days it will take, how much will get done in a day etc. I learned a lot from this first WebQuest, and out of all of the assignments we've done I think that I will be most likely to use this one frequently in my future classroom.