Humanizing Your WebQuest

Most of the WebQuests that have already been written involve learners reading web pages and collaborating face to face to accomplish a task. Going beyond just those people in your classroom, the Internet allows us to draw additional humans into the experience in a number of capacities:

• as experts (e.g., asking a herpetologist questions about snakes)
• as fellow learners collaborating on a common project (e.g., several classes each collect local gas price information)
• as sources of data needed for a task (e.g., polling the opinions of a particular type of person)
• as sources of feedback (e.g., asking for reactions to a specific learner product)

A WebQuest that includes one of these kinds of human interaction will be a richer and more effective one. But where do you find these extra humans? And how do you link them to your students to capture what they have to say? The answers to these questions will be clear to you after this exercise.

1. First, you will be divided into pairs. Your first job will be to independently and quietly scan the sites listed below. One person should look at the People sites while the other looks at the Tools. Make notes to yourself on the characteristics of each site.

2. Next, brief each other on what you found. Your instructor will give you no more than 10 minutes to accomplish this.

3. Now, tackle the problems listed below. Tap each others' expertise in coming up with ways in which the problem can be solved.

A. Ms. Jimenez wants her Spanish students to learn about the different musical styles in several Latin American countries. She has lined up web sites with audio files to expose her students to, but she'd also like for her students to interact in Spanish with kids of the same age in each county. How could she find other 10th graders in Mexico, Venezuela and Peru? What tool would be the best way to provide them with an area for discussion? To keep the interest going for the duration of her project, she'd like to post a weekly poll asking students to pick their favorite song from a list of 4. How would she do that?

B. Mrs. Menchise's English class reads Shakespeare's Julius Caesar every Fall, as do many other students elsewhere. She'd like to establish a place in which students could post their reactions to the play along with their questions and invite the participation of other English teachers and university scholars. Since each year there's a new set of students dealing with the same questions, she'd like the conversation to be archived so that old message can be used as a resource for new students. Her students are not allowed to use personal e-mail accounts at school because of district policy. Where should she house this dialog and how would she find participants?

C. Mr. Fruin wants his Government class to conduct a poll of adults on the topic of options for dealing with the Federal budget surplus. He thinks there might be regional differences in how people feel about this issue and his class has constructed a set of 10 questions with multiple choice options. How will he find respondents and how will he capture the data.

D. Mrs. Santoro wants her home ec students to learn more about bread baking. How will she find existing groups who are sharing ideas and recipes on this topic already?

E. Mr. Giannelli has developed a project in which his students will monitor the arrival of Spring. It involves taking photographs of a specific tree each week, counting birds in the school garden, and keeping records of the high and low temperature each day. He wants to find partner schools located further North and South who have already done similar collaborative projects. He needs to find a site that will host the photos taken at each site as well as the dialog among students about the topic. The project has tight timelines that must be adhered to for the project to succeed.