Process: Teachers will work in teams to design a Wildlife Habitat Certification WebQuest for students.
The WebQuest must be "an inquiry-based, often interdisciplinary, unit of study in which students get all or most of their information from the Web. Students use the WebQuest to turn information into knowledge and demonstrate their knowledge with a product. Teachers design WebQuests to address standards (Indiana's Academic Standards), differentiate instruction, pre-select resources, and scaffold learning. Resources may include print and other classroom and library materials; however, a true WebQuest must include information that is only available on the Web."
1. Each team will work together to create (use a word processor such as WORD) the
- Introduction (define expectations, set the stage, and motivate the students) and
- Task (define the learner outcome or product and describe available tools) portions of their WebQuest for students. See the National Wildlife Federation's Schoolyard Habitats® for requirements for habitat certification and suggestions for activities and resources.
2. Work as a team to define the
- Process that students will use. The process portion of a WebQuest is often designed in steps or roles.
3. Each member of the teacher team will research and refine at least one of the students' steps or roles.
- Write clear instructions for the student process.
- Pre select (identify and evaluate) Web sites for each step or role.
Use these Web sites as a starting point:
- Schoolyard Habitats®
- 42eXplore - Thematic pathfinders with definitions, activities, good starting points, and many more links and resources for more than 200 thematic topics, from Annette Lamb and Larry Johnson
- Identify the academic standards (Indiana's Academic Standards) that will be addressed when students do this work. Remember that a WebQuest is interdisciplinary and will probably address standards from several content areas.
- Describe the products that students will create to demonstrate that they have transformed the information that they gather into knowledge. Students may have several choices of possible products (pamphlets, pictures, news reports, posters, poems...) Products may be linked to each step of the process or used at the culmination of all the steps.
4. Work as a team to create a rubric to evaluate student products. Team members individually will write the portion of the rubric that applies to the step or role for which they were responsible.
5. Work as a team to design the conclusion. The conclusion may be a celebration of the task that has been accomplished.
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