This week has been very busy, I always thought Spring Break was a time to relax and recharge, but I decided to finish remodeling my basement and complete my GAME plan by creating a WebQuest for my Spanish students. I have completed the "hard" part of the WebQuest in writing the script for all of the pages and have hyperlinks to all of the different resources that my students are going to need to complete the task. All I have to do now is to do the tedious work of making the webpage for the WebQuest. It isn't difficult, just very time consuming and mentally taxing. The best part about it is that once I am finished I can use the WebQuest yearly and do not have to re create it (of course I will have to go back and make sure the links that I use are still active and replace them if they are not).
There are some things that I can use in my instruction that I have discovered. In searching for different resources I can have students do some of the heavy lifting for me. They can find three places of a certain topic then give me the link and a detailed description of the site that they have found and why they want to use it. This is a way for me to use the students to to the vetting of websites for me, and I know that they are okay to use because the school's firewall does not block out the pages that they find (they will use school computers to do their research).
The question about what do I still have to learn is kind of silly if you ask me. There is A LOT that I still have to learn. As Socrates said, "I know that I know nothing," is how I live my life. I am always going to have questions and I am always going to have something to learn, its just the way that life is. I think my mom put it best, "teachers are life long learners because we are actively learning everyday."
There really isn't anything that I need to adjust to my Plan to make it fit my needs. If the plan could finish my basement for me that would be great, but I know that it can't so I just need to stay diligent and go ahead and finish the WebQuest for my students to vet when we get back to work after spring break.
There are some things that I can use in my instruction that I have discovered. In searching for different resources I can have students do some of the heavy lifting for me. They can find three places of a certain topic then give me the link and a detailed description of the site that they have found and why they want to use it. This is a way for me to use the students to to the vetting of websites for me, and I know that they are okay to use because the school's firewall does not block out the pages that they find (they will use school computers to do their research).
The question about what do I still have to learn is kind of silly if you ask me. There is A LOT that I still have to learn. As Socrates said, "I know that I know nothing," is how I live my life. I am always going to have questions and I am always going to have something to learn, its just the way that life is. I think my mom put it best, "teachers are life long learners because we are actively learning everyday."
There really isn't anything that I need to adjust to my Plan to make it fit my needs. If the plan could finish my basement for me that would be great, but I know that it can't so I just need to stay diligent and go ahead and finish the WebQuest for my students to vet when we get back to work after spring break.
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2 comments:
Tony,
I can relate to your sense of a time crunch. I took two days off this week to attend our state reading conference, and while that was time well spent, I feel that I’m now behind in my planning, my preparation for parent conferences next week, and my Walden work. (On top of that, I’ve got a truck full of mulch sitting in the driveway, waiting to be spread about!)
It sounds like you’ve made great progress on your new Web quest, though. Your idea of having the students find sites that may work for your quest is excellent. It gives them another opportunity to use their research, site evaluation, and writing skills; it will also be empowering for them to see that you’ve integrated their work into your quest. The other benefit you mentioned applies to my situation as well; I mentioned in my post this week that I ran into a site that was accessible to me but not to my students. If they do the initial work of locating sites, I won’t have to worry about that last-minute scramble to get a site unblocked.
How do you create your Web quests? Do you use FrontPage or another web design program? In my former life in publishing, I created maintained a 350-page Web site using FrontPage and found it simple and straightforward. It might be worth looking into. The only thing I’m not sure of is how easily that aligns with Google sites.
Good luck on your quest—and your basement! Such projects have a way of consuming every waking moment, don’t they?
Kelly,
I use Google pages, or I think they are called Google sites now to create my web pages. I usually type out the different pages and then add the hyperlinks into the text when I cut and paste the script to the different pages. Google pages was great and straight forward, but the new format is taking me a bit longer than it should because I am not used to the format yet. I have tried microsoft front page, but I only have a trial version and it isn't the best thing for me to use.
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