1. Describe what you chose to do for your WebQuest.
I chose to have the students learn to distinguish a good web site form a bad one in terms of bias, documentation, and historical accuracy. It’s a project I’d been wanting to do for quite some time. So this makes me feel very good that I’ll have a neat online project that I can actually assign my students. Now if I can just find a slot of time in my school schedule and let’s hope the computer lab still has enough working computers to allow it to happen.
2. Have you had any problems or frustrations with QuestGarden itself?
I was having issues uploading the photos and video sample; it turned out to be that I was clicking the icon for a link rather than an image in the first case; in the second, I’m not sure exactly what made the difference; I went back in and repeated the paste of the URL for the film and it worked.
It’s not very clear how to use the html in QG; I used to work a little with html when I was helping out with a website, but QG doesn’t function quite like that forum environment did.
I’m particularly frustrated with the problems I’ve had with the formatting of my text. It’s not satisfactory to me that I can’t have my margins and tabs the way I’d have them on a Word page. I know that I was able to format decently when posting things in the forum environment with html, so I’m annoyed that it’s not easier. I don’t like having to settle for a less than perfect-looking text.
3. What have you finished?
At this point I have most of the student stuff posted, I’ve been putting off the rubric as I’m in a dilemma as to how I want that; I think I’m over-thinking it.
I have some sites that will be great to show subtle bias; at least it’s subtle to the students; it was pretty glaring to me. It will be interesting to see how that turns out when I do the lesson.
4. What would you still like to add?
I still have several sections to finish and the appearance to work on. I need images and will perhaps link a couple of humorous political videos to show the difference between a very biased piece and one that does equal opportunity political critique (assuming that the piece on JibJab that I’m thinking of is still out there).
5. Any other thoughts/comments?
I’ve learned something about the process of doing all these different things all at once in an ongoing progression. Or really, I’ve re-learned it or reinforced what I’ve known, but not had to do from the student perspective for a long time. It’s important to stay organized, keep calendars – mark due dates, it helps to do the easier things first – it not only gets them out of the way and helps you clear your head for the harder things, but also it gives you confidence that you can tackle the bigger, tougher things.
The WebQuest is a great example of this. Piece by piece, it’s not hard and by doing bits of it over time, it is much easier. I’ve known this from my own teaching for some time, but I haven’t assigned a large involved project in a very long time, so I’d forgotten how helpful and important it is to have intermittent due-dates and work on specific things a little at a time. Of course I do that with the units that I’m doing now, but you don’t generally assign students all the work from a given unit all at once like you might do for a very large project.
It’s funny how exhausted and disheartened I was the other night when I felt lost regarding a couple of assignments that I was having trouble with (spreadsheet/mail merge thing -- integrated project and the Adobe Acrobat form). I was up until 2 two nights in a row struggling with glitches (or in the form assignment, I’d accidentally changed a setting and it was interfering with the alignment of buttons). It was a struggle to keep going; I was determined, but ultimately failed. I was feeling that I couldn’t even complete the course and might have to drop or file for an extension if there is such a thing. After tonight, upon getting extra help and getting those two assignments sorted out and finished, I felt invigorated and could keep going until 2am getting other things (like this blog) caught up. If I didn’t have to go to work tomorrow, I’d push on through and get more done.
