Week Six

The focus of this week’s lesson was online communication tools. In particular, we focused on the use of a WebQuest as an online inquiry-oriented model. Many educators today use WebQuests to break a learning activity into different sections and challenge their students to research and dig for solutions to complex questions.

As part of this week’s assignments, I created my own WebQuest for students in my classroom. I spent a lot of time and energy on this assignment because I definitely see the benefits of using this sort of tool in my lesson plans. Creating a WebQuest is not the easiest thing to do, and it was very time-consuming. The benefits of the activity, however, outweigh the struggles of making the WebQuest. Since a WebQuest contains several different pages of information, it takes a lot of preparation and forethought to organize the activity as a whole.

I began creating the WebQuest with the idea in mind of using it in the current unit I am teaching in my Algebra 2 class. Therefore, I made sure to make it relevant and rigorous for my students. The first thing I had to do was figure out what kind of conclusion I wanted my students to come to by completing the WebQuest. Since I just began a unit on Systems of Linear Equations, I wanted to create a challenging WebQuest for my students to do as a summary of the unit. As a Kentuckian, most of my students are University of Kentucky Wildcats fans, so the theme of my WebQuest was UK Basketball. WebQuests are structured to include different sections: Introduction, Task, Processes, Evaluation, Conclusion, and Teacher Page. While creating my own WebQuest, the most challenging part was deciding what the task should be in order for me to get my students to the intended conclusion. Instead of giving my students all of the information they needed to solve the problem at hand, I directed them to the resources so that they could research the information themselves. This way, the students can develop research and computer skills while also solving a complex algebra problem. On each page of the WebQuest, I included pictures to make the activity more aesthetically pleasing and interesting to the students. I enjoyed this assignment and plan to create more WebQuests to use in my teaching career. As a math teacher, it is sometimes difficult to incorporate technology into the classroom, other than calculators, but now that I understand the purpose of a WebQuest I will use them more in my teaching.

Here is a link to the WebQuest I created:

http://zunal.com/webquest.php?w=126421