Week 7 blog

The webquest I created was on Motion and Newton's Three Laws. My student's in the 8th grade are currently working on Newton's Three Laws of Motion. Standards require the students to use technology in their learning and is also a teacher standard in the state of Kentucky. Because of this, I try to use technology in my classroom on a routine basis. For my webquest, I chose to use Zunal because it seemed to have the most details and the abilities to change the photos was a bonus for me. The webquest can be found here http://zunal.com/webquest.php?w=223667.  For this task, I changed many of the tabs on the left hand side to make the webquest a little easier for my students to use. As discussed in my past blog, I didn't like the way the author had each task in one tab. The way mine is set up requires the student to complete individual tasks and then move on to the next task. 

I didn't have many problems with creating my webquest. The time consumed to create it was much more than I originally thought. Although I originally intended for this webquest to cover two and a half class periods, I'm thinking it may take 5 full class periods to complete.  The webquest allows the students to have fun while learning and are given several forms of assessment - for their own knowledge and for my required goals.

I had a few issues with this webquest. First, I didn't like that the tasks, when clicked, required the student to go away from the original webquest. I would like it if the students clicked and it automatically opened a new window or tab. Second, the tabs on the left could be changed but no tabs could be added without paying for a different version. Third, the tabs were very easy to change but they contained material that was unnecessary and required me to empty each one prior to creating the webquest.

If I were to create this webquest again or if I were to use it, I would have the students complete each step for each day of the week with the final task taking two complete days. I would provide to the students papers they could just grab instead of printing to save time in the classroom.  I may also have a little more detail in my webquest so I am not answering as many questions and focusing more on the learning going on.