Assignment 4--Webquest

Prior to reading about webquests in Dr. Yuen's  IT 648 course, I was not familiar with them.   After taking three of his classes prior to this, there has been a some repetition here and there, but very little.  I always marvel at how he can find so many innovative, new ideas, to incorporate into his assignments and this was definately one of them. 

After reading about webquests in the literature information they made so much sense as an educator.  Webquests build on Bloom's Taxonomy of presenting a lesson, and gradually building to a more comprehensive concept.  The neat thing about a webquest is all of the information is presented in one site as a unit.  Students can see what they are going to be learning, how they will get the information, and learn how they will be evaluated.  Teachers can also share the webquests with fellow teachers, and learn from each other too. 

My webquest was on HTML and Web Design.  While I have used many of the assignments and tasks presented in the webquest before--I had never compiled it into a webquest.  This made so much more sense to me, because so much of my time teaching before was spent on helping students navigate to the different pieces of information needed for the assignment.  I liked how everything was organized in one location, so I would not be having to constantly help students get started each day of class.  Students before would also forget their check off sheets or reubrics, and I would have to give them another copy.  All of this was frustrating to me and took a lot of my time.

Another valuable element to the webquest I found appealing was the critical thinking aspect.  Incorporating critical thinking into teaching is becoming pushed more and more in education.  A webquest is a wonderful way to incorporate a higher order of thinking into a lesson.  By teaching a constuctivist lesson, that builds on a series of concepts and objectives--effective teaching and learning will occur.

My webquest can be found by clicking the following link:

https://sites.google.com/site/webquestapayne/