I work with 3rd grade students, so WebQuests would be an excellent online experience for my students because they have not quite reached that level where they are ready for independent research or collaboration. Their online skills are forming, but with the barrier of typing to convey their thoughts and ideas present, utilizing a technology that relied on this skill would simply amount to more frustration than learning for both the students and myself.
The content a WebQuest could teach my students is virtually limitless. Depending on the subject and unit we are currently studying, an appropriate WebQuest could be located and implemented for students. I would not allow students to choose their own WebQuests, but I would decide ahead of time which ones would be the best for them. This would help me so that I would know what they were doing and save time later because I would know which WebQuest they chose to do.
Podcasts or vodcasts would also help me teach. I could use them to engage students in public speaking or dramatic readings. These are skills that they use on a daily basis, whether they are aware of it or not. Using their speech to simply communicate is a basic skill that takes practice. Having students work on a podcast would enable them to hear and critique their own work.
I would use many direct strategies with the WebQuest. For starters, I would give a demonstration of a WebQuest. I would show the students what they were supposed to do so there would not be any questions regarding any vague directions. Additionally, I would use strategies to create mental links, apply sounds and images, and review. These would be accomplished with the WebQuests I would compile before the students were set to work on them. Cognitive strategies, practicing, analyzing, and reasoning would also be used to ensure that students were stretching their minds and learning new material. A final direct strategy would be to have students learn to guess intelligently when they were completing their WebQuest. I would not want them to randomly guess, but have the reasoning behind why they chose a specific answer. Problem solving would be a component of indirect instruction that would follow well with intelligent guessing. By understanding the difference between random guessing and problem solving, the students would benefit with more difficult challenges later in their work. Leading up to working on WebQuests, I would introduce an inductive strategy as well. This would enable me to guide the students, providing them with the necessary background information so they would be successful learners with their chosen WebQuest. The whole idea of a deductive strategy would be necessary for students as they completed their first WebQuest because they may not have been exposed to learning in such a manner previously, so it would be a new experience. However, as they became familiar with the modules of learning, they would understand the expectations and move into the inductive strategy.
With my students, it would be more difficult to use blogs and wikis with my students because they do not possess the necessary skills required to successfully input information with accuracy at an acceptable pace. They have the skills to report their findings, but I am afraid that for many of the students, the task of typing would prove too taxing. They would spend more time making sure that they hit the correct keys rather than what they were actually saying. It would be a generally frustrating experience for all of us.
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