Post #8

My group could use Webquest for our middle school language arts project by creating a webquest for the students to do on poetry. At WebQuest.org there are several links to sites in which you can author a WebQuest free of charge. It gives guidelines for creating a fun and effective webquest that I am almost sure I could create one to go along with our poetry theme. Just off the top of my head I could have students search for their own examples of the types of poetry mentioned, not including examples used in class. This would prove their understanding of each type of poetry and would make learning about poetry more interactive than just reading different poems to them.

A creative Web Quest idea I found for a language arts class was for students to write a biography on historians, inventors or scientists. By doing so they saved a dying alien race and the end result was an essay and a power point reporting their data. The students present their findings to the alien leader so he can take information back to his home planet and make his world a better place so the aliens can survive. This is a fun way to motivate middle schoolers to research earlier generations and their helpful contributions to our lives today.

I am a lot more comfortable using Excel now and believe my knowledge on creating online crossword puzzles will be easily applied to teaching an eleventh grade English class. I think using that to set up weekly vocabulary drills would be good exercise for the students to study the words in a different and fun way. I've also become fairly more acquanited with WikiSpaces and am starting to see the benefits of using it to communicate over that of e-mail. I would love to set up a class wiki space, but am wondering if that would easily be carried out. I'm still having a hard time convincing others of the ease of communications of wikis.