Webquest review

The Webquest I reviewed was interesting because it was actually created for an English classroom, but it seemed to fit almost better into a Social Studies classroom. By looking at the web address http://teacherweb.com/CA/ProspectHighSchool/AllQuietontheWesternFront/index.html, one might think it is based on the book All Quiet on the Western Front. However, I saw little connection to the actual book within the Webquest. The Webquest has to do with perspective and what it would be like to be invovled in conflict. All the sites that I went to from there seemed to be historical and have little to do with the reading comprehension goal included in the SOL. From the standpoint of a Social Studies lesson, I think it would be much more valuable in the context. The most thought in design was put into the first page, while the other pages are just plain text. The introcduction was just a couple short sentences and I think could have done more to hook the students into the project. One last problem with the Webquest was that some of the links they had to other sites did not work or could not be found. There were a number of links that worked for each category so students would still be able to gather lots of information but this is a definite shortcoming.

There was a lot that I did like about the project though. I think the idea of perspective in history is an engaging and important topic. The students were to look at four different groups of people that are involved in war and then make a group powerpoint. Each person would focus on one group and write about it as if they were experiencing that perspective in the first person. With all these combined together, it would make a cool portrayal of the different perspectives. I also like that for anything that she expects of the students she has an explanation such as the power point. She has a couple links on how to use power point included as well. She also includes the rubric of what she expects for the project. I think these are all valuable things to consider in making a webquest. I also thought it was interesting, because at the bottom of some of the pages she included a "safe search" by google for the students to use. I tried searching and it come up with a number of results. I think you would still have to be careful in included this because not all of the soruces that came up were reliable such as wikipedia.