Earnest - Week Six

Here it is – already Week Six! This week’s assignment was very interesting and something that I had utilized within my classroom when I was teaching, but nothing I had ever accomplished on my own. As I reviewed several WebQuests, I realized that it would take some effort to put one together. However, our instructor suggested the use of QuestGarden® and the company offers a free 30-day trial account. Once I signed up for an account, I began the task of creating my own WebQuest. I had not been able to find any quests about music when I was researching them, so even though I am not a music teacher, I decided to focus on orchestras as the basis of my WebQuest. I was able to find the neatest Web sites about orchestras, including one site that was designed just for kids – the Dallas Symphony Orchestra kids Web site. With that as the basis of my quest, I found other sites that I could use and the QuestGarden process led me through the different steps in designing the actual pages that the students would go through as they worked on the final task. Quest Garden made it so easy and one thing I really liked was the checkpoints they provided along the way to make one think and focus on the purpose, the design, the links, the standards, etc. for the WebQuest. I watched a video with Bernie Dodge, the creator of WebQuests, and he mentioned that he felt many times teachers and others were designing WebQuests that could best be taught in another fashion. I thought QuestGarden did an excellent job of making me think about what I was doing and how my quest would actually “teach” the students and how easy it would be for another teacher, even across the United States or the world, to use what I had designed. I am very proud of my resulting quest and hope to share it with my elementary music teacher. I didn’t find the assignment particularly challenging with the exception of the time that it took to find the Web sites I wanted to use and the images I wanted to include. If I had more time, I would probably do a little better job working on the design of the WebQuest and making it more inviting and exciting – different fonts, colors, images (maybe even some that were animated), etc. But, the most wonderful thing is that I was able to accomplish something like this that is useable within a few hours spread over a few days. That’s something any busy teacher could do!

My first QuestGarden site can be found at http://questgarden.com/107/76/4/100805183950/.