Week 3: Task Based Learning
Learning is a fun adventure with WebQuests!
Close your eyes and imagine that you are going for a wonderful trip to
England with your students - sounds pretty exciting right? You could visit the
great Tower of London, Stonehenge and the royal Buckingham palace. Enjoy the
iconic delicious English breakfast in the morning and eat scrumptious scones
with clotted cream and jams for tea. There are so many things to see, so many
things to do and of course – so many things to plan! I might not be able to
help you with the actual trip and grant your wishes like a genie in a magical lamp
but I can help you out with the planning. Interested? Want to find out more on
how I can help you to do that? Well, let me introduce WebQuests to you!
[Source: YouTube - 'Visit England']
What is a WebQuest?
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| The homepage for WebQuests website. |
According to
Dodge (2001, p.7),“a WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented activity in which most or all of the
information used by learners is drawn from the Web. WebQuests are designed to
use learners' time well, to focus on using information rather than looking for
it, and to support learners' thinking at the levels of analysis, synthesis and
evaluation.”
[Source: YouTube - 'What is a WebQuest?']
QuestGarden
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| The homepage for QuestGarden website. |
The introduction has the important background information to activate your learner's schemata before attempting the WebQuest
activity.
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| A QuestGarden titled 'An English Holiday' |
The task contains a description of the WebQuest activity that the
students need to complete either individually or in different groups. It is
very important to create a task that is suitable and appropriate to your
student’s language level.
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| 'An English Holiday': Task Section |
The process is a more detailed, step-by-step instructions for our
students to follow and guide them in completing the task.
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| 'An English Holiday' WebQuest: Process Section |
Also included in the process are resources for our learners to use
throughout the task. These resources have been carefully pre-selected by the
teachers for the students to use specifically for the task given to them. The
resources may include links to website, video or images from the internet that
will be useful for the task.
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| Resources can be chosen and preselected by the teacher to best suit the need of the task for learners. |
The evaluation provides the important information for our learners to refer
to on how they will be assessed in completing their task.
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| 'An English Holiday' WebQuest: Evaluation Section. |
The conclusion is a closing activity to the task and students get to
reflect upon what they have learned from completing the task. As teachers, we
can also ask for our students’ feedback in this stage and hear their opinions
or comments on the task.
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| The conclusion section. You can get feedbacks from your students at this stage of the lesson. |
‘Credits’ is a section where we can acknowledge and inform where did we
get our sources and right to use the materials (e.g. pictures, videos or
reading text) that we have included in our WebQuest activity.
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| 'An English Holiday: Credits' |
Finally, the teacher page is dedicated for the WebQuest creator (usually
teachers themselves) to talk about the ideas behind their lesson, who are the
target users and anything else that they want to include and might be useful for
the readers or visitors of their WebQuest page to read.
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| The final stage is usually called the 'Teacher Page' or the 'Student Page'. |
Strengths
In my opinion, there are several strong reasons for teachers to use WebQuests
in their lesson:
1.
Language
learning through WebQuest revolves around the completion of a meaningful task
which is the main idea behind any task-based learning approaches (TBL).
2.
The tasks
created for WebQuest provide a real world learning opportunity for our
students. The tasks are authentic because they draw from the learner’s real-life
experience and knowledge such as browsing the internet for information, making
plans for holidays or deciding what kind of food that are healthy and nutritious
for them. Students can relate to the topic and find the purpose of the task believable,
meaningful and realistic to their everyday life. They will also learn new
vocabulary, word or phrase that are related and specific to the task that they
are doing.
3.
WebQuest is also
a very versatile teaching tool for teachers. With WebQuest, teachers have the power to decide whether they want their learners to do the activity individually or in group. This
highlights its strength as a flexible learning tool for being able to support both autonomous
and collaborative learnings for all types of learners.
4.
Another
important feature of WebQuest that I want to highlight is that it creates a safe
environment for our students, especially young learners to use the internet. The
resources are age-appropriate because they have been screened and pre-selected
for the students to complete the task by the teachers themselves. This will
help to avoid our learners from wandering off to any suspicious or untrustworthy
websites that they might use for their source of information.
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| [Source: image by cherylt23 from Pixabay] |
Limitations
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| [Source: image by andreas160578 from Pixabay] |
1.
The graphic
presentation for WebQuest might seems to be a little old and outdated in
comparison to many other new educational software that we have available today.
It might not look very attractive to our young learners who are digital natives themselves and are exposed to so many different kinds of websites online.
Teachers have to be creative in finding or creating WebQuest pages that are visually
interesting for their learners to get them motivated to learn and do the task activity.
2.
Some students,
especially young learners might find the different stages and detailed instructions
given in WebQuest as too wordy, complicated and monotonous. This might cause
them to be uninterested to attempt or even give up halfway from completing the
whole task.
3.
Unfortunately,
websites dedicated for creating WebQuest such as QuestGarden are not an open
source for teachers to use for free. They do offer a 30-day trial period but after
it ends, the teachers need to decide if they want to continue their subscriptions
or not.
WebQuests: Love 👍 or loathe? 👎
Stocks (2002, p.56) argues that “WebQuests
offer good internet-based language learning opportunities because they provide
learners with exposure to authentic material, meaningful content and
possibilities for real communication in the target language”. So, if you are a teacher who believes in meaningful task-based learning
for your learners, then why not give WebQuests a try in your lesson?
Here is a tutorial video from YouTube on
how to create your own QuestGarden.
[Source: YouTube - 'Using QuestGarden']
Let me know in the comment section below if you love or loathe the idea
of using of WebQuests in your lesson. My final verdict is definitely - LOVE! 💕I am interested to know about your
opinions or comments.
References:
Comments
-Laura