Jane’s Blog

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WebQuests have been around since 1995 as the brainchild of Professor Bernie Dodge and Tom March.

Lamb (2005) gives a good summary of the 1995 – The Birth of the WebQuest in

Lamb, Annette & Teclehaimanot, Berhane (2005). A Decade of WebQuests: A Retrospective. In M. Orey, J. McClendon, & R. M. Branch, (Eds.)”. Educational media and technology yearbook (Vol 30). Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited.

Dodge thought of them as a way of encorporating the Web into classroom activities. They now make use of the Web and are becoming even more appealing to students due to the influence of the social nature of Web 2.0. This allows further embracing of student-centred pedagogies and constructivism.

Like all buzzwords, everyone claims to be able to create WebQuests but Tom March reviews webquests to find that less than half are “real WebQuests”.

Tom March’s list of Best WebQuests is a very useful resource.

A Real WebQuest must not just collect new information but the learners must transform the information.

One simple test for a Real WebQuest (March, 2003) is – Can the results be created by “copying and pasting”? If the answer is yes then it does not qualify.

You can find many useful WebQuest links on TeacherTap (Locate and Evaluate WebQuests).

Like all quality lessons, Real WebQuests should make use of authentic tasks and open-ended questions, collaborative learning.

WebQuests have their own search engines eg. WebQuest.org and here are the secondary maths WebQuests it found.

I think doing WebQuests for our Assignment 2 is a very good way to learn about engaging students with technology as a taken-for-granted, not-to-be-ignored tool!

One of the benefits of LAMS (Learning Activity Management System) and other LMS (Learning Management Systems) and VLEs (Virtual Learning Environments) is that they increase teacher productivity in the long term. Once the teacher has captured the lesson online they can reuse it, remix it and share it, even globally!

This type of software provides an authoring platform for creating, storing, distributing and sharing online educational activities.

LAMS has 4 environments (profile types):

Learner (to participate in a learning task), Author (teacher authors the learning tasks – or you could get students to design tasks for their peers), Monitor (where you can monitor each student’s progress as they flow throught the task’s steps) and Systems Administration.

LAMS is based on the output from an EDUCAUSE project. It focuses on ‘context’ in that the tasks created should be activity-based and encorporate collaborative pedagogies.

LAMS differs from other LMS with its “graphic workflow model” – it is a bit like my old days of programming where you create a flowchart – but in LAMS it is done online and the students click on each component of the flow to work on each task with their progress and work recorded for the teacher to monitor.

Teachers can share lessons via the LAMS Community Website.

These are useful scaffolding tools where a task can be individual or collaborative (vote, discuss, debate).