Focus Question:
What are WebQuests and virtual field trips?
WebQuests are
online inquiries by students—designed and guided by teachers. Students visit sited pre-identified by a
teacher and assess what presentations to share with their classmates.
Designing a successful WebQuest consist of stage setting
(introduction), task (activities), process (instructions), evaluation
(assessment or rubrics), and conclusion.
When being designed it must be considered the capabilities of the
students, primary goals to teach, ability levels working cohesively, and is
technology integrated seamlessly into the assignment?
Virtual fieldtrip
take students to places all over the world without ever leaving their school’s
classroom or computer lab. Museums,
science centers, historical sites, and other educational organizations have
developed online field trips an example found at the cave
of Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc.
TechTool 6.2
Social Bookmarking
Goodreads is an
online bookmarking tool for organizing your favorite books, books you want to
read, and books you did not like. After
rating so many books, the website starts to generate suggestions that you can
add to your reading list or select “not interested” to make it go away. I am in love with this website! I’m always making and losing book lists, and
now I can have it all in one place. I
give this site an A+! It has a strong
authority, is accurate, objective, current, covers several genres, and is easy
to navigate.
 |
| By barbourians on Flickr |
Delicious is a
resourceful website for bookmarking other websites. Add a pin to the bookmark bar on the web
browser and it is instantly useful for all your bookmarking needs. It organizes the bookmarks by “tags” that can
then be searched. This is handy but it’s
also frustrating. The tags have to be
easily memorized to know what you’re looking for. I would love to be able to organize my links
by folders or boards so that I could browse a certain subject, like on pinterest but pinterest also fails in that I wish
they had tags that searched only your boards.
Summary &
Reflection
This chapter was just an overwhelming amount of information,
and has lots of useful links. It really
opens up the classroom to the internet with WebQuests, virtual field trips,
interactive maps, videoconferencing, and websites created by universities. It also points out that filing things away
with paper is a flawed system. Things
get lost, misplaced, and outdated so quickly.
With using online bookmarking, I can organize all the websites I find to
incorporate into lesson plans.
WebQuests and online virtual field trips are resourceful tools
for any subject. I love the fact that teachers are taking the curriculum and
creating fun internet scavenger hunts to relevant materials for today. I’m looking forward to exploring WebQuests and
how I can develop something that is interactive, exploratory, and engaging.
1 comment:
Super analysis of tech tools - I like the way you continue to apply the website evaluation criteria! :) I love the concept of Goodreads myself, but haven't indulged in that one - too many things, too little time! :) How about if you design a delicious/pinterest combo tool?!? There may be something out there that I've yet to discover...in fact delicious use to have a feature called stacks which had the visual of pinterest, but they have taken that off the features for now.
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