Website Title: Viva España
Website URL: http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/j/x/jxz8/Student_Webquests/Bradley_Knudsen/WEBQUEST.HTML
Grade/Age Level: This web quest was designed for high school, level II Spanish class. This site could be easily adapted to younger college students as well.
Language & Content: The purpose of this web quest is to expose students to the culture and language of Spain by collaboratively working together to explore the cities using authentic tasks and resources. The overall task is to plan a trip to Spain, 6 days – 1 month in length, where the students will visit three cities and stay for at least two nights in each one. Students have a budget of $8,000 US. They must keep a travel journal along the way and provide a presentation to the class at the end of their journey. The four student roles are Travel Agent, Culinary Expert, Activity Manager and Trip Coordinator. The information is presented primarily in English in a very clean, simple format and is divided into six main headings: Introduction, Task, Process, Resources, Evaluation and Conclusion. The site’s external documents include pages on the various learner roles, grading rubrics and external links to authentic resources. The only issue is that some of the links no longer work; however, this could easily be updated. The resources are very effective because they include real world, authentic sources that are very applicable to the assigned tasks. For example, general resources include internet search engine for Spain and Grenada, El Pais (Spain’s newspaper) and an online directory for Spain. Resources for the travel “agent” include a Spanish hotel search engine and information on the various cities metro systems. The Trip Coordinator has websites such as the US embassy and consulate in Spain. This web quest is very relevant to the target audience because it deals with various aspects of planning a real world trip and includes various cities and aspects of the culture of Spain. It is very diverse in tasks and roles which hopefully will suits every learner’s interests and abilities. This site meets various language goals such as reading comprehension, writing and presenting in the target language (journals and group presentations) and learning about the culture of Spain. The web quest itself is a very practical application of the target language and includes clearly identified evaluation standards. A rubric for each role is provided as well as a question formatted checklist for the travel logs and itinerary. A unique feature about the task/evaluation is that students have the option of presenting a PowerPoint presentation or travel handbook depending on their preferred skills/abilities. The web quest is easy to navigate and includes a “home” link on each page (except for the external links). There are also hyperlinks which take you to various section of the main page so you don’t have to scroll. The main strengths of this web quest are the authentic tasks, roles and resources used and the collaborative group work required to accomplish the task. The main area of improvement for this web quest is the need for updated, working hyperlinks.
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3 comments:
Hi Stefanie, I like this webquest. I really like the introduction and the task, good motivation. I also like the idea of giving groups different roles. I have seen this in several of the webquests. One thing that was missing was a teachers page, and this seems to be absent from many webquests.
Hi Stefanie.
I like the webquest also. According to the strictest "criteria" for webquests, these travel-agenda webquests (which are popular with language teachers) can result in students creating very nice reports on existing online information, but the opportunity to synthesize information and use it effectively is limited, most of the time, to the recreation of a travel itinerary. This webquest takes a step past the problem by assigning journals, but I think the fullest opportunity is lost simply because, as John wrote, the teacher is not provided with objectives that might challenge higher cognitive skills. BUT, I don't subscribe fully to the strictest views of webquests. I can see many ways that students can gain from this quest. It is clearly defined (and serves the teacher's and student's needs adequately without needing a teacher's page), and it should motivate students to seek out lots of interesting information on Spain.
Stefanie
!Que Viva Espana! What a great idea for high school students. They would be so motivated by this task. Can you imagine the creativity that would pour out of the this work? You could email embassies and get all sorts of lovely postcards and artifacts for kids to paste as well as cut.
The rolls are also a great way for students to get experience with career choices in the future or just as a summer fun job. I like practical applications that are stepping stones for students. I know that I appreciated these opportunities as a college student.
It's a shame that the links are not current but I am sure that the web designer could make that regular assigement to help students learn about substainability of WebQuests and collaboration since these are shared worldwide. Great choices and I agree with the strengths of the webquest particularly the choices and creativity.
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