Why WebQuest?

Through this semester, I have grown to support the use of WebQuests in the classroom.  One WebQuest that I found was a Math and Sports WebQuest (http://www.mathgoodies.com/Webquests/sports/). What really drew me to this particular WebQuest was that it incorporated sports (everything from the Super Bowl to the Oympics), a popular interest for high school students, into probability and statistics lessons.  I would definitely utilize WebQuests in my future classroom and may even create one if I cannot find a WebQuest to meet a specific purpose. 

WebQuests can be incorporated into a lesson in order to engage students in Project Based Learning.  In my opinion, Project Based Learning is essential to learning in general.  It is important to be able to capture your students' interests in the material that you are presenting.  Three important components of Project Based Learning are group work, self-assessment, and reflection.

No Inquiries on Inquiry Based Activity

 My greatest challenge with creating the Inquiry Based Activity was the process of trying to find good, reliable websites that also have content that would challenge my students.  I definitely wasn't looking for material that is so challenging that my students might become frustrated, but I did want to find questions that would engage  my students and enable them to think outside the box.  Other than that, everything went well while creating this activity.  Formatting this worksheet into a Google document was simple.  I really liked that all of my work was automatically saved, every step of the way, while working in the document.  I was nervous about the name "Inquiry Based Activity," when I first saw this on the syllabus, but now that I've created one, I've realized that it's really not as scary as it sounds.  After successfully creating my IBA, I feel like I have more confidence to tackle the remaining activities and projects this  semester!

A Wiki Revelation

Throughout the past couple weeks, I have had the opportunity to create my own wiki pages.  Before doing the "all about me" wiki project, I would have thought that wikis were complicated or difficult to work with.  Before this class, I always struggled with using technology, so I expected my experience with wikis to be no different.  However, this was far from the case.  It was so easy for me to create my "all about me" wiki page.  The combination of having a clear set of step-by-step instructions and the fact that wikis are really not that complicated after all, helped me to breeze through this assignment.  In fact, I was recently given an assignment in my SPED 402 course to create a wiki page, and because of my positive experience with wikis in this course, I had absolutely no stress about the assignment.  I hope that there are more wiki assignments to come in this course!