Introduction: A Brief Description

Welcome to my Web Tour. I am interested in student-centered activities that are collaborative in nature. WebQuest (which we will explore in detail) is probably one of the first of these task-oriented, higher-ordered thinking activities that encourage students to work together for a common cause by seeking and evaluating knowledge collaboratively. I became interested in WebQuests and its associated inquire-based activities while taking classes through TESOL's certificate program on online teaching and learning. Since then, I've been tinkering with designing (and ongoing redesigning) of projects related to my mock course on advanced reading and writing through literature course for adult ESL learners.

I've also decided to work on an (this) associated page on blogging and HTML for composing the report. In a way it's a bit of three activities rolled into one: a web tour, working on a blog, and improving my page design with HTML. I've broken this web tour into five areas that (roughly) mirror the layout for most web-inquiry authoring tools: The Introduction, The Task, The Process, Conclusion. I didn't include Evaluation here, though, mainly because I can't for the life of me figure out how to move existing posts within a blog. (Once you create a new post it automatically goes to the top heading and I didn't want to have Evaluation as the first post. I forgot to include it in my shell post. Anyway, one is suppose to be able to move posts from blog to blog, but am not sure if this can be done within an existing blog.

Task: Using WebQuest Activities in OTL Practice

The task for this activity is to explore and report on a web tour of various technology-related sites that focus on teaching-enhanced tools. WebQuests and associated activities that promote collaborative learning and which are recursive in nature are excellent tools that foster high order thinking. (See Bloom's Taxonomy at http://www.ntlf.com/html/lib/suppmat/84taxonomy.htm

In particular, I'm interested in focusing on analysis, synthesis, and evaluation of material and enhancing it with individual megacognitive and personal schema. I previously taught a high-intermediate f2f ESL class in reading one summer at a local community college where group work was the primary focus of learning and where students choose their own individual and group-work novel to read, analyze, and evaluate. It was a great learning experience for all and highly productive. I believe this experience can be, at the least, duplicated on an online format; hence, my interest in exploring the possibilities of activities such as WebQuests.

Process: Investigating Sites Utilizing Various Technologies

One of the striking aspects of the power of online learning and teaching is the opportunity to use computer-mediated learning to its fullest capacity. There are several suggested online authoring system resource sites at the Web Tour section of the Knowledge Quest Resources page at Week 4 Course Units. I will review some of them in this section.

TrackStar at http://trackstar.4teachers.org/trackstar/index.jsp is a site for K - college/adult level instructors to "collect Web sites, enter them into TrackStar, add annotations for your students, and you have an interactive, online lesson called a Track."This brief description wasn't too clear to me so I started searching the site for examples and details. (This is one of the FIRST things I do when I visit new sites for I need, rely upon examples, graphs, charts, demo sites . . whatever for clarification.)

You can browse the site by themes and standards or by subjects and/or grades. I search subject/grade, college/adult and found links to 17,142 tracks for this level. I chose #9 Netiquette, Copyright, Fair Use, and Citing Sources at http://tinyurl.com/6zvyk6. Frankly, I'm not sure what advantage TrackStar has over other online resource sites.

Surweb at http://www.surweb.org/default.asp states that people can "create multimedia presentations in minutes using images, sounds & movies". The site has a collection of images and other media-related sources for presentations that are basically expository and which focus on themes and presentations relating to Utah. One can develop four basic presentations: colections, media shows, testing, and learning segments. The last entry for users (35,000) was 2002.

Web N' Flow at http://www.web-and-flow.com/ is a . . . well, once again, I'm not sure at to what it exactly is all about. It seems to be a kind of web-quest + development site that, basically, allows you what other sites can do without having to "cough up $25". Under 'What is Web-and-Flow? you have a list of what can be accomplished by using the site.

Tramline Tourmaker at http://www.tramline.com/tm/index.htm is a good site to collect and organize web pages on specific for students. Click on The Field Trips for some examples. I took a tour of NYC as a tourist and found it informative. One can choose how general or specific a topic covered. It's a good way for students to design their own tour. Most of the presentations are informative although one could easily design a tour that focuses on exploring specific topics or themes.

Filamentality at http://www.filamentality.com/wired/fil/index.html is a site chock full of activities and resources and has taken me a bit of time to navigate through its pages and see what is offered. I'm not too crazy about the page design with so much information listed on each page. However, focusing in on 'lessons, webquests' at the top-left menu gets one to pages with lots of reference information

WebQuests at http://questgarden.com/ is the enquire-based authoring page that I'm most familiar with. It's a little tricky navigating but focus on Links menu at the left. Click on WebQuest.Org.

Bernie Dodge is usually referred to 'father' of WebQuests. You'll bind him discussing WebQuests, Blogs, & Wikis at YouTube.

The following are some very good WebQuest sites:

Deconstructing Hate Groups and Hate Crimes

Winning by a Neck: An Examination of Important Concepts in Science

Making a Difference: Recommendations for Change in Media Practices

My own meager attempt can be found here. I attempted to code all of the information through HTML and found myself quickly reaching the Saturday deadline.

Conclusion and KQ Audit Trail

What began as a web tour of (principally) authoring sites became more of a knowledge quest on improving my blog writing and html coding skills. It's been difficult particular html codes into pre-existing html format. For example, when downloading images to a post Blogger creates the html code automatically. I wanted to change some of the attributes but had to navigate (carefully) within the code itself. I learned a bit more this way. However, much as I tried, I wanted the title of the blog to be embedded to the left of the little guy wandering through the WWW. It looks o.k as it is, but I wanted to not leave so much gray area to the right of the picture. Still working on it.

I'm also learning more code for the text and formatting elements of Blogger; I liked doing this. So, while my 'tour', as such, didn't quite pan out what I intended to be, the alternate paths that I took nevertheless led me to new knowledge. I'm happy with that and will continue.
Working within an already existing (partial) HTML shell such as with Blogger's format has been challenging and a good learning experience. I'm beginning to be brave and try editing existing HTML codes, and it seems to be working out o.k. . . so far.

The Digital Trail

Authoring Sites

Filamentality
TrackStar
Surweb
Tramline Tourmaker

(Specifics on these four sites are in Process: Investigating Sites Utilizing Various Technologies.)

WebQuest and Its Spinoffs

This is where it gets a little trickly. (Links to yet more links within pages, across sites.)
WebQuest News is Bernie Dodge's homepage. (He does commercialize himself, and who can fault him.) Bernie is the creator of
WebQuest.org which is the homepage for basic information on WebQuest(s) and resources / references for developing your own Quest page.

Other Authoring Systems

zWebQuest
phpWebQuest
TeacherWeb

HTML

I've been using various html web sites and reference books. Still working on this and will be for a while. I'm also trying to learn CSS at the same time. We'll see how it goes. I've had little luck with anchoring within pages. Can't get the hang of it but working on it. It'll come.

w3schools is a good introduction reference page for html. Use it a lot.
HTML Code Tutorial is also a good quick reference site that I use.