What kinds of topics lend themselves to WebQuests?
Caroline Murphy, seventh grade teacher at Southern Regional Middle School, Manahawkin, NJ, tells how she meets standards while keeping her students engaged.
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Caroline Murphy talks about developing a project with a mind towards satisfying a number of requirements.
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While WebQuests can be applied to a wide range of topics, they aren't equally appropriate for everything. You wouldn't use a WebQuest to teach the times table, the chemical symbols in the top two lines of the periodic table, or the state flags of New England. In other words, don't use WebQuests to teach factual pieces of information.
Even if you could locate Web pages that cover those topics, the WebQuest format isn't designed for mastering raw facts.
The best use of the WebQuest format is for topics that are less well-defined -- tasks that invite creativity and problems with several possible solutions. They can address open-ended questions like:
- What should be done to protect America's coral reefs?
- What kinds of people were most likely to survive the sinking of the Titanic? Why?
- What was it like to live during the American Gold Rush?
- What would Mark Twain think about the lives that children live today?
- How do other democracies deal with social problems like crime, and what, if anything, can the U.S. learn from them?
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