Wonderful Web Quests

For my inquiry section, we decided to create a Web Quest. This was an excellent idea in the beginning, but then I realized how much work it was to complete the task. I had six groups in total to complete. Each group was an explorer and they had to find out which explorer they were through the inquiry process. Designing a Web Quest for second graders was little challenging. The few aspects that I needed to take into consideration were reading, writing, and presenting the material. Before I started my Web Quest, I laid out exactly what I needed to do. I started to Google search some articles that could be useful to this assignment and marked down the important information. Then I proceeded to figure out what explorers that each group was going to use. The explorers we decided to use were: Christopher Columbus, Pilgrims, Henry Hudson, and John Smith. Due to time, I decided to repeat two of the same explorers for certain groups. In order to complete this Web Quest I used Google Sites to create each page. The beginning section of the Web Quest is the problem that they have to complete. This coincides with the Voki that was introduced to the class previously. This section was by far the easiest to create because it did need a lot of information. Moving on to the next few pages was rough. I spent all day on these sections because there was so much information involved. The way I went around lengthy articles was to include some pieces of information in a Goggle Document. This way the students were not worried about reading long articles. They can pick and choose what to write down on their organizer we supplied them with. The way I designed this Web Quest correlates with the graphic organizers that were given to the students. There was a fill in the blank section for them to write their hypothesis and their conclusion. I also decided to add in visuals on the Web Quest because this will help them follow directions on what to do. An example of this is if you click on the first crew it shows you a stop sign at the very top. After reading the first article students need to stop and write their hypothesis based on the first article. Once the students are done with writing their hypothesis they can begin to look through the articles and find out what explorer they have. Each article is personalized through Google Docs and this took up the majority of my time because I needed to find articles that were relevant to the explorers. After finding articles I made sure to hyperlink the Google Docs inside the Web Quest. The one factor that I had consider during this assignment is making sure the students or teacher candidates had access to edit it when presenting the information to the groups. One way I did this was just sending my fellow teacher candidates the link that is setup right to the Web Quest. There were so many important factors that I had to take into consideration. Once the Web Quest was designed I wanted to make sure everyone also had access to the Google Documents that I had created. I did this by signing out of the Mount account and opening up the Google Docs. At this stage everything seemed to be working fine. Some teacher candidates used their iPads to look at the Web Quest and I wanted to make sure everything would show up for them so that the students won't miss out on any information. It is so important to think of all the things that could go wrong throughout this experience because I spent so much time on this. Overall the students seemed to enjoy this Web Quest because we incorporated technology. Below is the link to the Web Quest that I created for the students. Until next time bloggers :)

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