WebQuest

For this posting I am going to review one of the many different WebQuest I found that would be useful in a math classroom. I started out just looking for WebQuests in general, and then decided it would be a better idea to narrow my search to math related ones. This way I could get ideas for my own WebQuest.

Before starting this assignment I had never completed or even see a WebQuest activity. My teachers did not use these types of learning activities in my classes growing up. While searching I found some very interesting and involved WebQuests that I feel students would find helpful and even exciting to work on. During my investigation on the Internet I came across a WebQuest entitled “A Tale of Two Cities.” On the introduction page this activity asks the students to work in groups to plan a trip to either Boston or Philadelphia. The students will be responsible for finding the prices of hotels and transportation as well as figuring out which activities they will be doing during their stay in the city. This project is dealing with math and money which gives the students an idea of how their math skills could be used in real life. Being able to see how what they are learning in class relates to real life will spark an interest and make the students want to explore the idea.

While reading through the WebQuest I noticed that the author did a good job at explaining in detail what the students were supposed to be doing. On the Process page, the author spells out what each member of the group needs to do to complete their part of the project. The project requires the students to break into three member teams where each member is assigned a certain role. One student will be the hotel planner, one will be the transportation planner and the third will be the tour guide. Each student is responsible for finding information on their role and report back to the group as a whole to put their trip together. The students are told on the website to use search engines to find their information. However, no websites are given as a starting point for the students. The author provides no resources as to where the students should go to find the needed information. I guess he is just assuming that they know how to successfully navigate through different web searches. This is the one thing I do not like about this site. For students that have never planned a vacation on their own, they may find it difficult to figure out what kind of websites would be good to look at for ideas.

According to the Teacher’s Page, this WebQuest was designed for students in a Pre-Algebra or Algebra class. I believe that this activity is very suitable for that age group. It has enough information to get the students interested in the activity and wanting to make the most exciting trip possible. It allows them to use previous knowledge to complete the tasks at hand. The questions are asking the students to find different hotel and transportation prices and be able to compare them to see which one is the better deal. This requires that the students have an understanding of ratios, percents, fractions, and comparing numbers, The students must evaluate their findings and plan the trip that will allow them to make the most of their money. The Teacher Page is not very detailed. It restates what the students are to be doing and just lists the standards that are involved. The author again gave no additional resources that a teacher could go to in order to obtain more information to help the students.

The conclusion provides the students with some other questions to think about during their PowerPoint presentations. These questions include having the students come up with distance and gas formulas, which graph would be the most useful for the data and which hotel was the best for the trip. The students will also vote on which group they think did the best job. The incentive for this project is that the winner will be allowed to present their idea to the principal and the trip will be considered for the class trip that year. I do not feel the conclusion did a very good job at tying everything back together. It kind of just leaves the students with information that should be included during the PowerPoint. I feel that it should have something about further exploration or even other questions to consider for extra credit in the presentation.

Overall I found this WebQuest to be pretty good and something that I would consider using with my students some day. However, if I used this one I would probably make some changes to better help the students complete the assignment.