My Idea for an Awesome Webquest!

So this week in my instructional technology class, we learned about webquests. I am actually really excited to learn more about creating them. I think that these webquests will be a really fun way for students to research on their own and get engaged in their learning.

I really enjoy working with older students and grades. I decided to look at 6th grade language arts core since I am currently in a 6th grade language arts class for my practicum. I found ways to incorporate writing skills and some social studies into my webquest.

For my webquest, I want to do something with Rick Riordan's The Lightening Thief (sorry I don't know how to underline it). In my 6th grade class, the students had read this book all together at the beginning of the year. In my class, I would read this book with my students. For their webquest I would have them research about the different Gods and Goddesses in Ancient Greece (especially those mentioned in the book). Then my students would decide which God they would want to be their parent. They will then write an imaginative story where they are a hero at camp half-blood and write about how they are claimed by their parent.

I am excited to get working on this!

Evaluating Educational Websites.

I think that learning how to evaluate websites is a very critical thing to learn. Some websites may appear to hold valuable information, but may lead students astray in their search for knowledge. I think that if I ever have students go to websites to find information, I would want to first evaluate some websites and then let my students pick from the websites I have already evaluated.

The website I chose to evaluate was http://www.space-explorers.com/index.html. I am very curious about space and space exploration so I wanted to find something that I could use in the classroom. This site seemed to be a good site, so I decided to test it.

To initially test it's credibility, I evaluated it using Kathy Schrock's guide. The website seemed to answer all the questions she asked pretty well. The website had photographs that looked real. You could easily navigate back to the home page and the spelling all looked correct. I could also find when the website was last updated and when it was created. The only thing that I was uncertain about was finding information about the author. I was able to find ways to contact the company that created the website, but it was a little strange that they warned that you may have someone answer who represents another company.

Next, I decided to check the accessibility of the website using WAVE. It was a huge shock to me that I found that this website had 35 accessibility errors!

After evaluating this website through these two evaluating websites and devices, I decided that this website would not be a great choice for me as a teacher, or my students to use. While this website looks like it would be very beneficial and fun for students to use, it came up short in the evaluations.