Quality of Webquest

When I began looking for webquests there were tons for every grade level and every subject. Some were very intriguing and sounded interesting, but after taking a closer look many did not stand up to the challenge of inquiry.

I created a rubric to evaluate the inquiry of webquests from my definition of inquiry- (An authentic task, that requires active questioning and higher order thinking skills to promote exploration and individualized learning). As I was evaluating the webquest many of them did not even earn half the points in my rubric. I found that the webquests for younger students did not involve any inquiry learning. For the younger grades, webquests were basic regurgitation with the use of websites instead of textbooks. The tasks they were asked to do were not authentic, and most importantly did not encourage students to use Bloom's higher order thinking skills. Out of ten webquest, only one came close to earning a perfect score.
I think that many teachers used webquests as a preplanned lesson so that students can be self-sufficient during classes. Or they think of using a webquest so they can say they used technology in their classroom. But many projects I saw used the computer and Internet as a glorified pencil and encyclopedia.

The webquest, Hero of the Year Stamp earned an 8 out of 12 on my rubric of inquiry. The basic concept was that students had to research and choose a hero they wanted to design a stamp about. Along with choosing how to represent the person, the students had to write a persuasive paragraph to the committee at the post office explaining why they should choose their stamp. They also had to include a timeline that showed important events in the hero’s life. I thought this webquest was engaging to students and had aspects that could be related to the real world. Students where given some freedom to decide who their hero was and how they best could represent that person on a stamp, while incorporating their creativity and applying their knowledge to make the stamp. But I also think some things could be changed to incorporate more inquiry. I think that the evaluation did not leave enough room for individualized learning. The students were all given the same task of creating a stamp but I think that the task could have been more open ended. Overall this was a very good webquest with many parts of inquiry.