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.
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