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FOCUS:
Five Rules for Writing a Great
WebQuest
Since
it was first developed in 1995 by Bernie Dodge with Tom March, the
WebQuest model has been incorporated into hundreds of education courses
and staff development efforts around the globe (Dodge, 1995). A WebQuest,
according to edweb.sdsu.edu/webquest/overview.htm,
is an
inquiry-oriented activity in which most or all of the information used by
learners is drawn from the Web. WebQuests are designed to use learners’
time well, to focus on using information rather than looking for it, and
to support learners’ thinking at the levels of analysis, synthesis, and
evaluation. WebQuests
are appealing because they provide structure and guidance both for
students and for teachers. The stated ideal of engaging higher-level
thinking skills—though making good use of limited computer access—seems to
resonate with many educators. A
quick search of the Web for the word WebQuest will turn up
thousands of examples. As with any human enterprise, the quality ranges
widely. Many WebQuests were created hurriedly to complete a class
assignment. Others appear to have been developed over a longer time and
thoughtfully refined each year while being implemented. Some of the
lessons that label themselves WebQuests do not represent the model well at
all and are merely worksheets with URLs. By
closely analyzing what’s out there, I’ve identified five general bits of
advice that will help anyone create WebQuests that are head and shoulders
above the rest. Thanks to some wrestling with the alphabet, the five
guiding principles can be captured in the word FOCUS:
Find
great sites. Orchestrate
your learners and resources. Challenge
your learners to think. Use
the medium. Scaffold
high expectations. Find
Great Sites One
thing that distinguishes a good WebQuest from a great one is the quality
of the Web sites it uses. What makes for a great site? The answer varies
with the learners’ ages, WebQuest topic, and specific learning you hope to
bring about. In general, though, you’ll want to find sites that are
readable and interesting to your students, up-to-date and accurate, and
come from sources your students wouldn’t ordinarily encounter in
school. Master
a search engine.
How do you find great sites? It helps, first of all, to fully master one
or two of the most powerful search engines. It’s somewhat a matter of
personal preference, but as of this writing, most savvy users would
include AltaVista®, Google™, and perhaps Northern Light™ at the top of
their lists. Most
people do their searching by typing a few words into one search engine
(e.g., Yahoo!® or Dogpile®) and then plow through a blizzard of irrelevant
sites. It’s much better to learn the quirks and advanced search techniques
of the better search engines to get what you’re after faster. By mastering
just a few commands, you can quickly become a better searcher than most of
the Web-using public. One Web page many have found useful is Seven Steps
Toward Better Searching. Probe
the deep Web.
According to one report (Bergman, 2000), more than 550 billion Web pages
now exist, only 1 billion of which turn up using the standard search
engines. What’s left is a hidden “deep Web” that includes archives of
newspaper and magazine articles, databases of images and documents,
directories of museum holdings, and more. Though some of this information
can be rather obscure, you can find items that add a unique and
interesting touch to a WebQuest. Take,
for example, a WebQuest about whales. A newspaper account of people trying
to save a beached whale would add human interest and drama to an otherwise
routine lesson. By searching the deep Web you might find a link to a page
in Thomas (a tool to search U.S. legislative information on the Internet,
provided by the Library of Congress) describing legislation from the 106th
Congress designed to protect whales. Searching through the Library of
Congress’s American Memory Collection might lead you to a letter by Thomas
Jefferson on whaling and a picture of a whale
skeleton. Searches
of the TV Episode Guide and the Internet Movie Database will take you to
pages showing how whales have been portrayed in popular culture. Including
such sites drives home the fact that what you are teaching is important in
the world outside school walls. Where do you find such accounts? I
maintain a page called “Specialized Search Engines and Directories” that
might help you find these resources off the beaten
path. Don’t
lose what you find.
A practical problem in lining up great sites is keeping track of them.
Most teachers do their work at more than one computer. Sometimes you’ll be
searching at your desk at school. Other times you’ll be at your home
machine, and someone will e-mail you a great site. You might look over the
shoulders of your students and find something great you want to use in a
future lesson. So how do you store and access your finds so that you can
get to them when you need them? Web-based bookmark servers such as
Backflip are a boon to teachers. Once you’ve set up a free account, you
can log in from any computer and look at or add to your list of bookmarks.
One especially useful benefit is that you can set up categories and
subcategories and put each bookmark into some kind of organizational
framework as you find them. Orchestrate
Learners and Resources Teachers
who survive the first few years on the job are masters of organizing
children and resources. The experience of not having enough books, globes,
or frogs for students teaches one quick-ly to arrange activities so that
resources can be shared. The same wisdom can be applied to problems of
less-than- optimal computer access. A great Web-Quest is one in which
every computer is being used well and everyone has something meaningful to
do at every moment. Organizing
resources.
As of this writing and for the foreseeable future, there are not enough
computers to go around. The creative response to that is to organize your
activities so that whatever access you do have is used well. Here are some
of the possibilities:
Organizing
people.
Designing a great WebQuest is also a matter of organizing your learners.
Though having teams and roles for students to play is not a critical
attribute of a WebQuest, practical considerations lead to group work being
more common than not. Having more than a superficial knowledge of
cooperative learning strategies has proved to be a useful background for
WebQuest designers. According to Johnson and Johnson (2000), the critical
attributes of a successful cooperative learning environment include the
following:
A
well-orchestrated WebQuest has these qualities as well. Good designers
recognize that much of the learning in a WebQuest takes place away from
the computer as students teach, debate, and debug each other’s
conceptualizations. Guidance on how to work together should be an integral
element of the process section of the WebQuest. Find ready-made pages to
support effective cooperation on the Process Guides page developed as part
of the San Diego City Schools Patterns Project. How
do you create positive inter-dependence in a WebQuest? You create separate
responsibilities by having learners read different Web pages or by having
them read the same Web pages from differing perspectives. You can also
divide the production responsibilities in ways that parallel production
careers in adult life (e.g., scriptwriter, graphic artist, or producer).
The trap to avoid is creating separate roles that do not result in
information all members of the team will need to accomplish the end
goal. Challenge
Your Learners to Think We’re
passing through a period in which standardized test performance drives
much of what happens in schools. At the same time, everything around us
tells us that tomorrow’s adults will need to analyze and synthesize
information to succeed in most professions and to participate fully as
citizens. It takes a gifted teacher to play both games at once, but it can
be done. A WebQuest is not the vehicle for mastering a list of U.S.
presidents and their terms of office, but it can provide an engaging and
complex backdrop on which to hang bits of knowledge that would otherwise
seem static and inert. In
an earlier era when content was more stable, mastering factual information
might have been sufficient. Teaching about Canada before the Web, for
example, would typically involve assigning individual provinces for
students to research in the library. Millions of students dutifully
produced reports with titles such as “Manitoba: Land of the Crocus Bird”
and forgot every word of it within weeks. In freshly wired classrooms
today, the first impulse of many teachers is to treat the Web as an
extension of the school library and to assign the same kind of research
report. Typically, the thinking that goes into this kind of activity is
simply a matter of paraphrasing and summarizing, even if the final report
ends up as a Microsoft® PowerPoint® presentation. The loftier reaches of
the brain go unused. Taking
your learners to task.
How can we do better than that? The key element of a great WebQuest is a
great task. It’s all about what we ask learners to do with information.
Over the past six years, creative teachers have developed tasks that go
well beyond retelling and engage their students in problem solving,
creativity, design, and judgment. Find a list of these task types and
examples on the WebQuest Taskonomy page. The page has proven useful in
helping others see alternative ways to frame what they ask of their
students. Design.
The topic of Canada, for example, was treated as a design task in the
Design a Canadian Vacation WebQuest. The task given to students was to
create an itinerary through Canada that would satisfy a given family of
four, each of whom was interested in different things. Working in teams,
students research possible destinations and learn to compromise to fit it
all into a reasonable trip. One can imagine that the reports presented by
each team would engage the rest of the class as well, because each
vacation designed would represent a different set of trade-offs and
discoveries. Not only is it likely that students would retain more about
Canada, but they also get a taste of the give and take that their parents
go through in similar circumstances. Journalistic
tasks.
WebQuests have also been created based on a journal-istic approach in
which learners take on a persona and create a news account or simulated
diary as if they were present at a particular time and place. In We Were
There, for example, students portray delegates to the U.S. Constitutional
Convention appearing on a talk show. In
Witchcraft or Witchhunt, students create two diaries in parallel: one
portraying an accused witch, the other an accused
Communist. Persuasion
amid controversy.
Another approach is to look for authentic controversies in the world as a
vehicle around which to organize the study of a topic. In A Forest
Forever, students look at the contending uses for national forests. By
taking on the perspectives of forest rangers, timber workers, off-road
vehicle enthusiasts, and Sierra Club members and then crafting a
persuasive message communicating that point of view, students learn to see
things through multiple lenses. Use
the Medium These
are just a few of the possible ways in which tasks can be designed to
elicit higher-level thinking (and motivational energy). A great WebQuest
goes beyond retelling. The
pedagogical structure of a Web-Quest is not limited to the use of the Web.
One can imagine a “BookQuest” in which a compelling problem or question is
presented and the solution is created by dividing up and processing the
information in a variety of books scattered around the classroom. Teachers
with only one computer sometimes compensate by printing out selected Web
pages so that students not seated at computers will have something to
read. These are compromises, though, and don’t fully exploit the medium. A
WebQuest that’s fully flexing the model is one that could not be
accomplished easily on paper. People.What
qualities are unique to the Internet? First, recognize that the Internet
isn’t just a network of computers; it’s also a network of people. In
addition to selecting interesting and appropriate Web pages for your
students to read, line up humans with expertise to share. There are
ask-an-expert sites for many fields of study. You might also use a parent
volunteer. Busy parents might be willing to serve as mentors about a topic
for a week or two by e-mail. Children in other classrooms can also serve
as learning partners and sources of information. The ePALS site is an
excellent way to connect with other schools. By creatively selecting and
recruiting, you can bring other useful people into your lesson with a
simple e-mail link. Conversation.
Another unique quality of the Internet is the fact that conversations can
be captured and used as raw material for learning. The act of writing down
one’s thoughts helps clarify them and opens them up to being refined and
amended by others. You can add a page to your WebQuest that allows
students to post their opinions and findings, and invite others outside
your classroom to participate as well. The QuickTopic site allows you to
add an interactive forum to any Web page in a matter of
seconds. Selective
glitz.
The Web is becoming a multimedia environment. In the next decade, the Web
will begin to look less like a slick magazine and more like television.
Though it’s critically important to avoid distracting your learners with
dazzle and noise that serves no instructional purpose, it’s also important
to take advantage of audio, video, and images on the Web when
appropriate. The
FindSounds site lets you search for sounds using keywords such as trolley,
wolf, or eagle. The addition of a Webcam view associated with your lesson
(e.g., a street scene in London, a live view of a dolphin tank) can also
add a great deal of interest. The Earthcam site will help you find Webcam
views for almost any topic. Scaffold
High Expectations A
great WebQuest asks students to do things they might not ordinarily be
expected to do. If you’ve seen inner-city high school students re-enacting
the Amistad Trial or hammering out a common position on coral-reef
protection legislation, you know that learners can amaze us when they’re
given the right support. Scaffolding is a temporary structure used to help
learners act more skilled than they really are. A great WebQuest builds
scaffolding into the process as needed so that the bar of what students
can produce can be raised. Three
types of scaffolding are in a WebQuest (Dodge, 2000): reception,
transformation, and production. (See Scaffolding Tools in Resources on
this page for specific examples of scaffolding
tools.) Reception.
The Web allows us to put students in touch with resources that they might
not have seen before. If learners are not fully prepared to extract
information from that resource, then everything else in the lesson will be
based on shaky ground. A reception scaffold provides guidance in learning
from a given resource and retaining what was learned. Examples of
reception scaffolds include observation guides, tips on how to conduct
interviews, and online glossaries and dictionaries. Transformation.
WebQuests ask learners to transform what they read into some new form.
Because this might not have been commonly experienced by learners in their
earlier education, they might benefit by explicit help on such processes
as comparing and contrasting, finding patterns among a number of similar
objects of study, brainstorming, inductive reasoning, and decision
making. Production.
WebQuests commonly require students to create things they’ve never created
before. The production aspects of the task can be scaffolded by providing
students with templates, prompted writing guides, and multimedia elements
and structures. By doing part of the work for students, we allow them to
go beyond what they would be able to do alone. Over time, we hope, they
internalize the structures we provide until they can work
autonomously. Conclusion The
WebQuest model continues to evolve. Over time, the number of high-quality
WebQuests available will increase. By following the five FOCUS principles,
new WebQuest creators can take advantage of what we’ve learned as a
community and give the next generation of teachers a better place to
start. Resources Bernie
Dodge’s WebQuest pages:
Seven
Steps Toward Better Searching: Specialized
Search Engines and Directories page: Taskonomy
page: WebQuest
site: Others’
WebQuest pages: A
Forest Forever: Design
a Canadian Vacation: We
Were There: Witchcraft
or Witchhunt: Search
Tools:
AltaVista: Dogpile: Google: Internet
Movie Database: Northern
Light: Thomas:
Legislative Information on the Internet: TV
Episode Guide: Yahoo!: Scaffolding
Tools: Reception: Transformation: Production: Other
Web Sites: American
Memory Collection: Backflip
(bookmark server): Earthcam: ePALS: FindSounds: Process
Guides page: QuickTopic: References Bergman,
M. K. (2000). The deep Web: Surfacing hidden value. BrightPlanet.Com
[Online]. Dodge,
B. J. (1995) Some thoughts about WebQuests [Online]. edWeb.sdsu.edu/courses/edtec596/about_Webquests.html Dodge,
B. J. (2000, June). Thinking visually with WebQuests [Online].
Presentation at the National Educational Computing Conference, Atlanta,
GA. edWeb.sdsu.edu/Webquest/tv Johnson,
D.W., & Johnson, R. T. (2000) Cooperative learning [Online].
www.clcrc.com/pages/cl.html Bernie
Dodge,
PhD (bdodge@mail.sdsu.edu),
is a professor of educational technology at San Diego State University. He
focuses on the design, implementation, and evaluation of computer-based
learning environments and teaches a variety of courses on that theme.
Thanks to a new federal PT3 grant, he’ll be spending the next three years
developing a new approach to preservice teacher education in a project
called “Learning Through Cyber-Apprenticeship.”
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