In our previous educational psychology class, we learned all about how
authentic learning tasks are effective in promoting meaningful learning.
Instead of rote learning, effective teachers strive to challenge students and
promote their critical thinking skills and creativity. WebQuest, by creating a
platform for teachers to create and share inquiry-oriented activities on the
World Wide Web, is a great resource for teachers who are looking to motivate
and challenge their students.
In our class activity, I picked the role as the “altitudinist”
because I think higher order thinking skills are important in the real
world as we are usually not evaluated on factual recall skills, but our abilities to analyze and synthesize. From looking at some example WebQuest sites, I think WebQuest
has great potential to introduce projects to students that simulate real-life scenarios and
challenge them to apply what they’ve learned inside the classrooms. It
also has the potential to motivate the students by giving them opportunities to be
creative and express their points of view (designing brochures, PowerPoint, drawing, and campaigns, etc.).
On the other hand, I think efficiency is also important as we want to
optimize the amount of learning in a reasonable amount of time. Since activities
focused on promoting higher-ordered thinking skills often require a big portion of the students’ time, I think WebQuest should not be used too frequently as
high school students often have a lot of materials to learn in a limited amount
of time.
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