*unless also a teacher with a strong understanding of pedagogy.
What is it? What does it do?
QuestGarden
is an online authoring tool, community and hosting service that is designed to
make it easier and quicker to create a high quality WebQuest. No knowledge of web
editing or uploading is required.
WebQuests are defined by its co-creator, Bernie Dodge (his original conception paper is here) as:
'an inquiry-oriented activity in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the Internet ... [they] are designed to use learners' time well ... to focus on information, rather than looking for it and to support learners' thinking at the levels of *analysis, synthesis and evaluation.'
QuestGarden is the place to go for stimulating teachers' ideas for designing their own WebQuests, and there are a range of templates and step-by-step guidance to doing so. Fully developed Quests can be accessed by co-authors privately or collaboratively using a group code and shared with the community. Users are encouraged to comment on other work and to build new Quests onto existing designs. This is importantant as teachers aim to adapt exisiting material to suit the needs of their learners. Existing WebQuests can be searched in numerous ways and there is a recently-published section (all those completed in the last 14 days).
QuestGarden has a strict age policy. Children are excluded from participating on the site. This is justified here. A free
30-day trial of the lesson creation tools is available and a 2-year
subscription that
offers additional features costs only $20. See more on this in limitations.
Relevance to language learning?
WebQuests have a specific relevant to ELT. They take a constructivist approach to learning and an integrative approach to CALL (Computer-Assisted Language Learning). They also fit the model of content and task-based learning. Students don't just search for information, the principle use of 'Web 1.0'. Although we are now heavily into an established phase of 'Web 2.0', this tool is still a
relevant idea for the classroom and still widely used by in ELT because
of the task-based approach that they take.
WebQuests collate, organise and assess information under a specific goal that has been set by the tutor. They draw on students' thinking at these three levels*:
•ANALYSIS breaking down into parts, forms
•SYNTHESIS combining elements into a pattern not clearly there before
•EVALUATION according to some set of criteria, and state why
There can be a high level of autonomy and creative production employed. With proper guidance and 'scaffolding' techniques employed by the teacher more qualitative learning can take place amongst the students. They are mini-projects in which much of the input comes from the Internet. They are based on some assumptions about effective learning. Authentic tasks, with real data, are better than textbooks. Learning occurs more with Social interaction than working alone. Higher-order thinking needs to be developed early. Furthermore, uncertainty and doubt are instructionally useful. Learners are given a problem which seems out of their reach, but with enough support they are shown that they can achieve outcomes. Because there is a powerful underlying approach to pedagogy, however,children and novice teachers are actually disuaded by the site from designing their own.
WebQuests can:
- be engaging - students collaboratively learning and working towards a common goal.
- draw on the enhancement gained from social-interaction/working in groups.
- be a great use of Internet resources without needing specific technological know-how.
- be designed to aid communicative learning, the sharing of knowledge and discovering new things.
- be used more simply as a linguistic tool.
- have an interdisciplinary feature, using task-based activities to discover about language and subject(s) simultaneously.
- encourage higher-order thinking skills. such as shown in Bloom's Taxonomy - cognitive, affective and psychomotor (three domains of educational objectives).
- involve tasks that require self and peer-motivation.
- require or develop greater concentration and effort.
adapted from Gavin Dudeney, The Internet and The Language Classroom, CUP, 2007
Trying it for myself - with a WebQuest Partner
WebQuests are usually framed by four main sections:
- Introduction - overall theme established. Background information on the topic. Key vocabulary and concepts which learners need to complete the tasks.
- Task/Assessment - Explains clearly what learners have to do at each stage. Needs to be highly motivating and intrinsically interesting for them. Based on authentic situation. Can use role-play scenario.
- Process - Guides learners through activities/research. Web-based resources, reached via task doucment. For language learning, this can focus on lexical items/grammar. One or more 'products' need to be presented at the end of stage.
- Evaluation - A reflection, self-evaluation, comparing and contrasting phase. Giving feedback, discussing what was learned. Teacher evaluation with modeling/examples of good work.
The QuestGarden site actually remodels this outline and guides the creator through 5 stages (see right), setting up checkpoints on the way. It recommends doing each stage in order, although any creator can go back and forth and modify things later. It uses a WYSIWYG layout, so clicking on Tools > Preview shows your WebQuest progress at any stage. It also has advice (tips) at each stage and intelligently gives stark 'alerts' if it thinks you might have gone wrong.
For my collaborative effort, with fellow student, 'Bua', from my ICT group, we established a fictional Summer School. We decided to use one of the suggested templates - 'On Trial' but modified the tasks and process for our imagined learners.
There is also a constantly updated 'readability' grade. The site calculates an estimate of how difficult it will be for someone to read
the text in the WebQuest. It does this by using a readability formula known as the
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level. The higher the number, the higher the difficulty of reading the text, and isn't necessarily better. Clearer instructions could lead to a lower, but better grading. Our Quest finished up with a 4.5 grading, which seems about right for our students. The process (stage 3) is the most important, the most time-consuming phase of all, because that functions as the explicit guide for the students. Process involves students actively requiring an interdependency, so that it is not sufficient to discover information about their 'role' in isolation. Although there are times when students are individually researching their role. They need to share and discuss their role in relation to others. This will be encouraged but also deliberately tested in a class debate about 'who has the most important role?' - this is a deliberately misleading question. Some might think the 'judge' - but actually the jurors make the judgement as a group, a judge can only set up a possible verdict.
The resulting trial will only take place once a lot of discussion and practice has taken place, with writing tasks given out along the way, to test newly-acquired knowledge.
Our final shared, editable WebQuest draft is here: The Stolen Laptop
We would encourage comments and suggestions as to how it can be improved. Please do so using the links above or comment directly after this blog entry.
What limitations are there? QUALITY CONTROL ISSUE !
WebQuests can be a very time-consuming process for the teacher to prepare. To do them well, requires a lot of planning, research and cross-referencing. They can easily be left under developed, which could cause students to feel demotivated or unable to see the point. Even adapting an existing WebQuest requires care. It could easily be badly handled if rushed. But done well, they can engage students and tap into higher-level thinking skills, collaborative working and take the positive benefits of learner-learner interaction, leading to task completion which can be greater than the sum of its parts.
QuestGarden, as a prominent resource, is unusual for employing an age-restricted policy. It doesn't just put users off by a subscription (after one month free), it actively seeks to remove under-age and poorly conceived Quests. They even reserve the right to cancel membership for anyone under 18.
While it might be a notable effort to keep the quality of the material on the site higher than it would otherwise be, it is somewhat arbitrary to say that 18 is the point at which a well-designed Quest is more likely. There are plenty of experienced and employable teachers who would still be unable to design a WebQuest with the strong underlying pedagogy that is encouraged.
Furthermore, it is not beyond the possibilities of an '8th grader', as the site refers to, to be able to make one. Looking at some of the above-18 WebQuests, I would say that the quality control is not high and many of the Quests out there are simply poorly executed and not recommended at all.
More Information:
Watch an interview with Bernie Dodge from his office in San Diego, including an example WebQuest about The Berlin Wall:
More information on WebQuests at Bernie Dodge's original site - WebQuest.org
