WebMagic with WebQuestWebMagic with WebQuest

Alicia García de la Santa & Víctor R. Gonzálezagarc123@alerce.pntic.mec.es vgonzale@platea.pntic.mec.es

CFIE Valladolid II – http://cfievalladolid2.net(Teacher Training and Educational Innovation Centre in Valladolid, Spain,

from the Consejería de Educación de la Junta de Castilla y León)

Socrates Comenius 2.1 “Think, Construct & Communicate” http://cfievalladolid2.net/thinkweb

20th Conference ESP Association with COMP@CT & ECOLE

WebQuest

Is there a “magic” potion for an Is there a “magic” potion for an eMagic educational exploitation of eMagic educational exploitation of

the Web?the Web?

The answer is yes andit is called…

«Is it possible to integrate Web browsing with successfull learning principles to develop educational standards with the students in our classroom?» 

Or, in other words:

The answer is yes and it is called ...

WebQuest

It is the application of a learning strategy through guided discovery towards a process of work developed by the students, using the resources of the WWW.

In short, Webquest means research, investigation through the Web.

According to Bernie Dodge:

«There are at least two reasons that the World Wide Web is an exciting development for educators:

Using the Web breaks down the walls that separate schools from everything else.

Using the Web forces active learning. »

Why the Web?

Active learning

In Dodge´s own words active learning involves:

«putting our students in situations which compel them to read, speak, listen, think deeply, and write.

While well delivered lectures are valuable and are not uncommon, sometimes the thinking required while attending a lecture is low level comprehension that goes from the ear to the writing hand and leaves the mind untouched.

Active learning puts the responsibility of organizing what is to be learned in the hands of the learners themselves, and ideally lends itself to a more diverse range of learning styles.»

WebQuest domains

When first faced with the prospect of developing learning environments on the web, it's easy to be overwhelmed by the possibilities. One way to reduce the complexity of the task is to chunk things out into these three domains:

Inputs Transformations  Outputs or Outcomes»

Inputs(what the learner

receive)

Transformations(the cognitive

processes )

Outputs(what the learner

produces) • references, articles • images, sounds • news, reports, press releases • experts • dynamic data resources • projects/field reports

• compare / contrast • concept creation  • analysis • synthesis • evaluation • problem-solving • decision-making • policy formation

• oral presentations • reports, letters, etc. • creative writting • audioconferencing • videoconferencing • web publishing 

Web-What? ... WebQuest

An indicator of the popularity of this strategy is the number of times that appears the term "WebQuest" in the WWW.A search engine as Google gives back hundreds of thousands of references (approximately 438,000 in September 2004, and 2,440,000 in March 2006).

In the education specialized pages there are collections of WebQuests, organized by levels and areas of contents at the disposal of whoever may want to use them directly in their classes, to adapt them to their students or just as a guidance to design their own.

Bernie Dodge has been named by eSchool News as one of the 30 main innovators in educative technology. In short, the WebQuest is fashionable. Perhaps it is by justified reasons and it is well worthy to know it in depth.

Dodge [1], the WebQuest designer, defines it as: "an inquiry-oriented activity, based on a doable and engaging task, in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from predefined resources on the Internet (and elsewhere)”.

Yoder [2] says that it is a: "type of lesson plan... that incorporates links to, from and along the World Wide Web. The students are presented a scenario and a task, usually a problem to solve or a project to complete. The students are given Internet resources and asked to analyze and synthesize the information and come up with their own creative solutions". In addition, the students solve the WebQuest forming workteams and adopting each one of them a perspective or specific role, to which they have particular information.

[1] Some Thoughts About WebQuest. Bernie Dodge (1995). [2] The Student WebQuest. Learning & Leading with Technology, vol. 26, no. 7. Yoder, M.B. (April 1999).

Web-What? ... WebQuest

Web-What? ... WebQuest

WebQuests do not require the use of complex, nor specialized software for the creation of multimedia files. One or several teachers simply need to have the following knowledge and capacities to create a WebQuest: to know how to surf through the WWW, to know how to suitably handle the search engines of information, to have basic knowledge of HTML design for the hypertextual document creation and obviously, to have a good command of the contents to be taught.

Summarizing, a WebQuest is an attractive didactic activity for the students, that allows them to develop deep understanding.

Web Web resourcesresources

ConclusioConclusionn

EvaluatioEvaluationn

ProccesProccesss

TaskTask

IntroductionIntroduction

TeacherTeacher’s page’s page

WebQuest blocks (sections)

What does a WebQuest activity look like?

Let’s look at an example...

In order to make the learning easier for the student, the conexions between inputs, transformations and outputs should be helped or supported by the educator with the so-called cognitive scaffolds of three types:

1) Reception 2) Transformation 3) Production

Scaffolding

The WebQuest way vs. the traditional way

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 the Web, then everything else in a lesson will be based on shaky ground.

A reception scaffold provides guidance in learning from a given resource and retaining what was learned.

Reception scaffolds

WebQuests ask learners to transform what they read into some new form.

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.

The goal of these transformation scaffolds consists of going beyond the information structure, while the reception ones help to perceive the structure that already lies in the information.

Transformation scaffolds

WebQuests commonly require students to create things they have 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.

Production scaffolds

And now... Let’s get to work

A WebQuest about

WebQuests

http://webquest.sdsu.edu/webquestwebquest-ms.html

Where can I find info about WebQuests?

The WebQuest “Home”

http://webquest.sdsu.edu

The WebQuest “2nd home”

http://www.ozline.com/learning

Where can I find more info about WebQuests?

The WebQuest “our home”

http://cfievalladolid2.net/thinkwe

bAnd a LanguageQuest:

http://www.kennisnet.nl/thema/talenquest

WebQuest

Constructivistic approach

Constructivistic approach

Project based learning

Scaffolding the process

Collaborative learning

Good web resources

Active learning: transformations

OK. So, which are the WebMagicpotion ingredients?

Active learning: transformations

And the name of the potion is:

Collaborative learning

Project based learning

Good web resources

Scaffolding the process

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