Paper Planning Your WebQuest

A Hands-Off, Minds-On Workshop
Bernie Dodge, PhD. • Ed Tech Department • San Diego State University

The purpose of this workshop is to walk you through the WebQuest design process. The hardest part of creating a great WebQuest isn't the techie web development part. The challenge is more about curricular problem solving. It's actually a fun process to take a fuzzy idea and wrestle it into a viable, student-centered lesson that engages higher level thinking.

This workshop is keyed to the web page at http://webquest.sdsu.edu/designsteps/

Sometime later when you've got access to a computer and the web, you'll be able to revisit the steps we'll go through offline. Let's begin!

Who Are You?

We'll be passing these pages around the room getting input from each other. To ensure that your paper finds its way back to you, write your name, the school you're from, and what you teach in the space below. Also write a sentence or two describing your previous exposure to WebQuests.

1. Choosing a Topic

Writing a WebQuest is time-consuming and challenging, at least the first time. To make the most of your efforts and to maximize your chances for satisfaction and success, you should choose your WebQuest projects well. There are four filters that your idea must pass through.

The WebQuest should:

1. be tied to local, state or national curriculum standards;
2. replace a lesson that you're not totally satisfied with
3. make good use of the Web;
4. require a degree of understanding that goes beyond mere comprehension.

There are great lesson ideas that will not pass through all of these filters. They might make for terrific classroom activities, but they won't make terrific WebQuests. Your task now is to juggle possible ideas until they meet all four criteria.

These criteria are explained on this page: http://webquest.sdsu.edu/project-selection.html

In the space below write two general topic ideas that meet all four criteria. We'll work on one of these but it's good to have a second one as a backup. In the space below, write a short description of each idea and explain how it meets each criterion. Write legibly, as you'll be exchanging papers with others in the workshop for their input.

2. Choosing a Design Pattern

Over the years, creative teachers have discovered ways to use the WebQuest model in ways that hang together beautifully. The task is engaging, it elicits creativity or synthesis, it intelligently organizes the ways learners interact with each other and with data, and it results in products that demonstrate understanding. Sometimes such exemplary lessons can be generalized so that one could pour different topics into the same effective structure. Such structures are called design patterns, and they can save you a lot of development time. The next step in the process is to think about your topic and try to identify a pattern you can use.

There are descriptions of each pattern at http://webquest.sdsu.edu/designpatterns/all.htm

Choose ONE of the topic ideas you generated in step 2. Identify 1 to 3 design patterns that could be applied to the topic and describe how you might use each one below.

Make a Choice!

Though there may be several ways to treat your topic, you can only do one thing at a time. One of the patterns will feel more appropriate to you than the others. Pick whichever one seems to bring out the best thinking in your students and engage them more deeply in your subject. Write your choice here:

3a. Write up the Task Description

The Task is the single most important part of a WebQuest. That's why we start here. The Task section of a WebQuest tells the learner exactly what they will have done at the end of the lesson. It's usually a tangible, visible artifact or performance that shows what they know, and more often than not, it's a scaled down version of something that adults do as workers or citizens or just plain educated people. Once you've chosen a design pattern, you've also gone a long way toward defining your Task.

Avoid the drive-by, serial thought-kller trap. Don't write up a sequence of mini-tasks here. Instead describe a single challenging, meaty outcome that will, at first, seem a little beyond their present capabilities. You're writing TO your learners, so use the second person and an appropriate level of language. It need not be any longer than the space provided below.

3b. Write up the Learners Description

As with any writing, creating a WebQuest requires that you have a clear picture in mind about who your audience is. That not only grounds you in a context of curriculum standards that will be addressed before, during and after this WebQuest, it also clarifies the levels of social and language development you can expect. This description will eventually wind up on the Teacher Page part of your WebQuest, and now's the time to get it down in writing. Who are the learners? What class are they taking? Are they typical in their abilities and interests, or is there something unique about them?

3c. Write up the Standards

Some future zigzag in educational policy may change this, but at the moment in North American public schools, just about everything we do must be tied to a state, provincial or national standard. So what standards do you have in mind? Do they come from more than one content area? Even if you haven't yet memorized the standards of your domain, write down a rough version of your official intentions below. These, too, will wind up on your Teacher Page so that educators in other parts of the world

4. Describe Your Assessment

For many students, your WebQuest will seem like a radical departure from the norm. They may have figured out how to pass a quiz you give, or the kinds of things you look for in an essay. But how do you know when you've done a great job taking a position on global warming or writing a simulated diary? They won't know, so you have to tell them.

Most WebQuests accomplish this by providing a rubric. By writing this rubric now rather than later, you accomplish several things. First, you futher clarify what's important to you. There are many possible learning outcomes from a lesson of this scope and some are more important than others. Second, by deciding what's important to you, you will focus yourself in the later parts of the design process and it's less likely that you'll be sidetracked by fascinating websites you find that don't lead to an important learning outcome.

There are three steps in creating a rubric.

4a. Generate Possible Dimensions

What are the various ways in which the products and performance of your learners might vary? What kinds of things might you look for? Here are some possible dimensions... but these are only a sample:

What dimensions might be used to measure what learners do during your WebQuest?

4b. Select a reasonable number of dimensions

Five to eight dimensions is a reasonable number of dimensions to assess. The number can vary depending on the complexity of the task and the sophistication of your learners. Select a subset of the dimensions you generated and write them here:

4c. Write benchmark descriptions

The next step is to think about what a great example of each dimension looks like, and what a terrible one looks like. By nailing it down explicitly, you may make your judgment concrete enough that your learners can evaluate each other, thus saving you some work later.

Write down a clear description of each dimension at both the A and F level. Later, when you're writing up the actual student web page, you'll also include one or two benchmarks between these two extremes. That will come easier to you once you've pinned down the endpoints.

5. Describe the Process

The Process section of your WebQuest will be the easiest part to conceptualize because in many ways it's like the lesson plans you already know how to write. Because it requires you to find web sites appropriate for your learners, though, this might be the most time-consuming part. It's simple if you take it one step at a time.

5a. Establish common background knowledge

Your learners may come to this lesson with varying degrees of prior knowledge of the topic. To minimize those differences, have them read one or two sources to get them all on the same page. What kind of source would you want them to be looking at? What search terms will you use on Google that will help you find those sources quickly?

5b. Organize the Interaction Among Learners

The next step is to figure out how (or whether) to group your learners. Even if we had enough computers to go around so that each learner had one, it would still make sense to have learners working in groups. You can create the opportunity and necessity for them to teach each other. You can also use groups to represent viewpoints and perspectives found in the world that are applicable to your topic. And obviously, a well structured group allows for division of labor and getting more done. The Jigsaw technique is especially useful as a way to create interdependence and a task-orientation among learners.

So, with that as back drop, how will you organize your learners? Will you have groups? If so, what will be the purpose of each group?

5c. Organize the Interaction Between Learners and Data

The heart of your Process section will involve laying out the steps and interim tasks for each group. What subtasks will each learner or group of learners do? What will they need to do it? Describe each task, what kinds of online resources they will be looking at, and what keywords you'll use to find those resources.

6. Write the Introduction

Now that the entire WebQuest has taken shape, you can figure out how to introduce it. The Introduction section is there to hook the learner's interest and to prepare them for the work ahead. There are several ways in which you might make the Introduction motivating. Think about your topic and learners and circle those motivational strategies you will try to use. Generally you only need one or two since the Introduction is short and punchy.

Now write the Introduction using the strategies you circled. Address it to the learner using "you".

7. Webify Your Planning

You've now completed the planning process! You are well begun and more than half done. All that remains is for you to download the student and teacher template for the design pattern you chose in step 2, open them up in a web editor like Dreamweaver or Mozilla Composer (http://mozilla.org), and type in the words you drafted here.

The most time consuming part of what remains will be finding online resources to flesh out your Process section. If you did a good job of figuring out what search terms to use, that needn't take you too long.

Last, prettify your pages using graphics where appropriate.

It's useful to have someone else evaluate your draft using the rubric at
http://webquest.sdsu.edu/webquestrubric.html

When you're ready to let the world know about your WebQuest, consider submitting it to the WebQuest database by filling out the form at http://webquest.org/wqdb/editwq.php.

© 2003 - Bernie Dodge. All rights reserved.