Website Evaluation #4

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.