This week in my reading and practice, I have found some useful tools in the communication of webquest and questgarden to be very helpful. I found that as long as you can construct assignments on this website and make both searchable and attractive for students today. My first objective in creating this webquest was to not make it something that was already repeated in class. If a student reads repetitive material on a website, they will often not even finish what needs to be read. Students must have something to keep their interest and have an activity that will allow them to be active in leading discussion of the material and findings the next day. From what I have seen in education, there has been a constant evolution from black ink on white paper to movies and now to the internet. My questgarden gave a quick review of the material covered for what the assignment will require. After giving the assignment I immediately informed the students that there will be an in-class exercise about our own class becoming our own legislative house. This assignment immediately should get the students mentally preparing for what kind of bill they would present to the house if they were legislatures themselves. As they learned in a previous lesson, time in the house is precious and the speaker decides what bills are presented. After the in-class exercise, the students were then informed of a web assignment. The students were given the link to the Library of Congress and asked to see the action taken by the individual who represents their state in the legislature. Students can see if a bill was presented or see how their individual in the legislature voted on a particular bill. After the students seen this information, the students were to write a one page paper on how they felt about the importance of the bill presented or voted on. Did the students feel that they are being represented in the best way possible? Giving students an assignment that allows them to go outside of the textbook allows them to see how much more information is provided. Then internet is full of political ideology that can be resourceful. I would like to utilize tools like webquest and BlogSpot for means of communication with students. Many students can be reached easier via the internet, mostly because that is where most youth now socialize. When I built my webquest/questgarden website, I noticed the only difficulties I had been corrections to be updated and uploading images from my own computer. When addressing the corrections issue, you have to make sure it is prefect the first time it is finished. When you make corrections and go to re-post the information, it may take a couple of hours and students, like myself, would like to get things finished on time and ready to go for the next class. The last difficulty that I ran into was uploading images as backgrounds. It was not like a PowerPoint, where you could upload the image, send it to the back, and be done with it. On this website, it wasn’t that simple. In conclusion, web access on the internet allows for many possibilities when providing an educational resource. As a teacher, I would utilize Webquest/Questgarden and also Facebook. The ability to utilize Facebook would allow attracting in the students socially and then posting things such as the URL for the Webquest/Gardenquest website on the page to draw them in.
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