The webquest ideas were certainly intriguing to me. The projects and activities suggested by the videos are the type of classroom environment I want to create. There seemed to be much emphasis on letting the students choose what they want to learn. While this may mean with guided choices, I am not sure how much they could narrow down a topic they want to cover when starting with "whatever topic they choose". I think the projects would be much more efficiently run if I, as their educator, had the preliminary work completed in as many topics as possible and they choose from there. As the math teacher said it is a great deal of work but the benefits of what the students learn makes it well worth while.
I did not really like any of the webquest we were to preview. Having my students thinking through the mind of JohnWilkes Booth simply seems evil to me. There are other ways to get a perspective on the Civil War. The worst webquest was the poem. There was no real web research to do, aside from looking up War based poetry. The assignment is to write 32 lines of poetry on how it feels to be at war, not something middle grade students could possibly comprehend.
The best webquest was designing the travel brochure for Egypt. I did not like there pushy way of delivering some of the suggestions but there are students/people who do not mind that kind of attitude. The travel brochure had great directions, web searches to use with specific information to find for each person n the group. A huge time saver when trying to get projects such as this started and when students are not accustomed to this type of project.
