2 WebQuest and Project Based Learning

This week, as described by Nina, was another “demanding, eventful, challenging, and fruitful week.” To be honest, each week I feel myself very lucky to be involved in this learning process. It is true that various types of information are growing day by day on the Internet and the educational value of Internet based activities varies widely. This week I learned that one way to engage students in authentic instruction and assessment is through WebQuests, which are inquiry oriented activities that use Web resources to solve the problem. After reading about WebQuests, I realized that many terms like authentic assessment, meaningful learning, collaborative project, learner autonomy, higher critical thinking skills, and active learning strategies are all intermingled with each other. The question to be asked here is how WebQuests enhance critical thinking and learner autonomy and motivation. Meaningful learning requires learners’ actively engaging in a meaningful task. Active participation also can be provided with group work and when students learn to work in a collaborative environment, they become responsible for their own learning. From my experience of creating a WebQuest, I can undoubtedly say that WebQuests include all these terms. For example, in the Introduction of the WebQuest, students are placed in the role of different person within a complex situation and this requires students to use higher-order thinking skills of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.

While creating my WebQuest, one of the most difficult things for me was to write the introduction part because from other examples I noticed that the problem offered students are open ended and real world, requiring working in groups and require exploring a variety of different perspectives to come up with a solution. This was hard for me. I think I need to work more on WebQuest.

This week’s another topic was project based learning. The project-based learning, an active learning strategy, is an approach that learners focus on developing a product or creation by learning. I think project based learning is an umbrella term which covers webquests and problem-based learning. I am not sure. I’ve gone through Susan Gaer’s article about project based learning. I agree with her when she says “less teaching and more learning”. In her article she gives some useful tips which are important while implementing project based learning. I think that teachers should take into these three elements into consideration before applying their projects. First one is “the project must be geared to the population”, and then comes “the students must see value in a project” and lastly “flexible timeliness is necessary”. Just like WebQuests, using a project based learning, helps motivate students to learn language for a purpose.

Finally, I believe these two important terms reach to success as long as teacher gives guidance and adequate instruction to the task or project. We cannot underestimate the importance of teacher’s role while creating WebQuests and project based learning.