My role is the Altitudinist.

   

Your Impressions

WebQuest	Strengths	Weaknesses
Grow School Greens	Great for research, gets kids involved and excited.	Takes too long to see results. Young ones may lose interest.
Where is My Hero?	Gets kids to research history and get information from real life people.	It limits their creativity.
Underground Railroad	Good to apply knowledge of slaves and slave holders.	Too many process, may take too long.
Ice Cream	Great for creativity.  Allows them to think outside the box.	May get messy if you feed them some ice cream.  And you must feed them ice cream after that.
Ancient Egypt	Good for learning about new cultures.	Seems hard to follow.

 

 

The best webquest would have to be Grow school greens.  It forces the child to be responsible for something.  The webquest has them do research, but then put that research to work.   In the Process it provides individual jobs to be done at the same time promoting teamwork.  This allows room for higher level thinking and help when they get stuck.  At the end of this project they can see all their hard work pay off in the form of produce. 

I feel another good webquest is We all Scream for Ice cream.  This webquest allows children to be creative in the flavors they create and the label they produce for their ice cream product.  It is a great way to mix fun with learning.  This webquests offers the opportunity to analyze how to make ice cream and adding your own fun with your own flavors.  The Advertising allows the children to work as a group and analyze how the best way to get their ice cream flavor out there. This provides additional work for advertisement research.  

I feel the worst is the Ancient Egyptian WebQuest.  I feel the layout of the webquest made it hard to stay on track.  It does encourage them to learn about a new culture, however, there is nothing about individual and group work.  Not forcing children to have their own role in the project allows room for one student being stuck doing all the work.   The eliminates the higher learning for any of the other students.

I feel the worst is also the Unraveling the Underground Railroad.  This webquest allows individual work but the positions that the child holds forces some to be the controller and some the controlled.  This project may be good for bullies to show them how it feels, but it seems like it could cause a negative light on a child.  It is a great idea to teach the children of the underground railroad, but having them act out may go too far.  It doesn’t really offer much analyze of information.  It also hinders their creativity because the only thing they are doing is creating journals after the research.  It does encourage them to synthesize multiple perspectives, I just feel it is not as good as the others. 

The best: are the best because they allow both teamwork and individual work with analyzation of research that is being put to work using your hands to allow the students to remember longer.  These also provide the students with a chance to be creative from growing plants to creating a new ice cream flavor.  These provide a little of analyzing information with synthesizing multiple perspectives at the same time allowing them to use creativity.

The worst: to me are the ones that didn’t provide a little of each point.  These would either provide multiple perspectives but not allow them to be creative.  Or has them analyze work but doesn’t allow them to see different perspectives.