WebQuest: Your Forecasting Future

Introduction

This post is targeting educators of all abilities of students. It includes 7 parts:

1.What is Webquest?  How does it support English teaching?

2.Parts of a Webquest

3.A good example of Webquest: Your Forecasting Future

4.How to make a webquest yourself?

5.Limitations

6.My ideas on using it 

7.Sources of information

What is WebQuest?How does it support English teaching? 

WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented lesson format in which most or all the information that learners work with comes from the web. In another word, it is an online activity where a teacher gives out a quest and some certain websites for students to visit and gain answers or responses to the quest. 

WebQuest has been widely applied to many educational institutes, for example, universities (where the first WebQuest was created), high school, language schools. A WebQuest can be created using various programs, including a simple word processing document that includes links and website.

Parts of a WebQuest

There are mainly six fundamental parts in a WebQuest. They are:

(1) Introduction: This part is written to address students directing and tell them the information about the WebQuest and what they are going to do. A quest normally has a topic and students have different roles according to different situations, for example, in a research targeting the hygiene of restaurants, students might take up roles as experts from Health & Hygiene Department who have a great wealth of knowledge on that and are able to comprehend, explain, and report what they are looking at. 

(2) Task: This part will inform students of what they should do to accomplish the task. They will learn from this quest and they are going to do it. They will know what they will learn from the quest and how they are going to do it, for example, how the work is divided and how the result should be presented.

(3) Process: The process part will outline step by step what is needed to be done. This section should also provide website links.  When choosing websites, teachers should avoid sites with many distractions.

(4) Resources: List all the links and resources that students will need. In some cases, this part is skipped when everything is properly explained in the process part. But it will be helpful to let students have an overview of resources in this part.

(5) Evaluation: Teachers will let students know how their work is going to be graded in this part. The more specific the criteria, the easier it will be for students to fulfill. This part ensure the standardized evaluation for all students. Detailed criteria should be pointed out to students in this section. 

(6) Conclusion: This section summarizes the whole WebQuest. It should also cast light on potential future thought on the topic. Besides that, students should be encouraged to give out their opinion (feedback) as the end of the WebQuest in the conclusion part. 

A good example of WebQuest: Your Forecasting Future

Your Forecasting Future is one of the first few WebQuests I have come across. There are some points I think is vital for a good Language-skill enhancing WebQuest: 
1. It focuses on more than one English skills; 2. It encourages group work but also gives weight to individual effort

1. It focuses on more than one English skills

Reading comprehension--each student is assigned different roles. To understand their roles, they need to do some specific reading so as to take on them. The picture below illustrates the readings given by the teacher.

Speaking--students are required to present their study results in front of the class. Besides, the activity includes a lot of group work, for example, brainstorming and result reporting, which necessitate students to communicate in the target language.

2. It encourages group work but also gives weight to individual effort

Group work--This web quest enables students to work with group members but also students outside the group. Each student has their own role and before reporting what they found in the reading, they discuss with their counterparts in other groups, which promotes students' ability to work with more people.

Individual effort--Group work sometimes can be the cause of people shirking responsibility. However, each group member has a unique role, they have to be responsible for their part in either the presentation part  and preparation of it.

How to make a WebQuest yourself

A picture is worth a thousand words, and not to mention a video. Below is a WebQuest tutorial which I found rather useful. If you are interested in making a WebQuest, try to follow the instructions in the video. =) 

Limitation of Webquest

• Time-consuming: a small Webquest usually lasts for 3-4 classes, which fosters more than one English skills. However, this takes up too much time of students both from inside and outside the classroom.

• Difficult for beginners: If students are just beginners, a whole webquest might be too difficult for them as it requires students' ability to read,think critically, analyze and present.

My ideas on using it:

This activity is a two-lesson plan designed for Form 1 to 3 middle school students in Hong Kong who aged 11-14. Educators can make adjustments to this plan to fit in their contexts.

Due to the limitations I mentioned above, this 2-lesson plan is designed to cater for the needs of middle school students who are busy with school work and extra-curricular activities. 

Introduction: Students are required to make an animal-purchase plan for the San Diego zoo. The zoo is facing the loss of visitors due to the new amusement park in the city. Therefore, in order to increase the amount of tourists to the zoo, students have to figure out what animals visitors expect to see in the zoo and make a purchase plan in accordance with it.

First of all, students have to find out information on the annual number of visitors in the last 8 years, including the percentage of adults and children, to the local zoo.  The information will be found on the official website of the zoo provided by teachers. 

Secondly, students pick out three years when the zoo received most tourists and find out what animals are kept in the zoo  and most visited in these years respectively from the same website.

Thirdly, students are expected to look for information on the website "Tripadvisor" to find out tourists' attitude towards these animals.

Fourthly, make a purchase plan based on the information they got from the website and present it to the class in 10 minutes.

Source of information

"Parts of the WebQuest" are learned from 

http://quickbase.intuit.com/articles/the-complete-guide-to-creating-web-quests

Video of "making a WebQuest" is from 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cyht-ehlAWY

"A good example of WebQuest: Your forecasting Future" is from

http://questgarden.com/67/72/1/141012131325/index.htm