WebQuests in the Classroom

I have used WebQuests before with success in my undergraduate education classes. One of our assignments was to complete a WebQuest that was designed for high school history students. This particular WebQuest was a preview to a government research paper. Students had to walk through each web page that was presented, and decide whether it was an official and accurate web page or a hoax. At first glance, some of them were difficult to tell, especially since the web address was only a character or two off from the legitimate website. The purpose of this WebQuest was to get students acclimated to researching political issues online, so that when the time came for them to do independent research they would (hopefully) be able to recognize illegitimate websites.

I think WebQuests can be a powerful and engaging tool in the classroom, if implemented appropriately. In order to be beneficial, the teacher must spend A LOT of time preparing the WebQuest for students, in particular with obtaining proper websites for students to explore. It is a very time consuming task for teachers, but I think that the hard work pays off. WebQuests allow students to become engaged in curriculum material that they may find dull or boring otherwise. They allow for collaborative learning, shared responsibility, and teamwork, which are all positives in the classroom. During a WebQuest, students have to become experts on a certain topic and share this information with their group. They know their teammates are counting on them to contribute to the completion of the final task.WebQuests increase student motivation, and therefore students are likely to put forth more effort and work to the best of their abilities on the task; in doing so, they will learn more than they would from a simple lecture or PowerPoint! Many WebQuest tasks are also designed to address problems or issues that exist in the real world, which makes the task authentic. In WebQuests, students use real, timely resources instead of dated textbooks and materials that are only presented from one point of view. They prompt higher-level thinking and pose questions that require more from students than just spitting back information. They provide authentic, engaging, and worthwhile activities that students will truly benefit and learn from.

Microsoft PowerPoint

I have never been a fan of using PowerPoint in the classroom. I think that it encourages uniformity, rather than creative thinking, on behalf of students. All students have to do is copy and paste information onto multiple slides and then read their information word-for-word during their presentation. Students spend more time perfecting their backgrounds, color schemes, and adding illustrations than researching and learning about their topic. 

PowerPoint does have some benefits if used effectively in the classroom. You can easily input pictures and links, utilize different templates, and you can add note pages to provide additional information. However, I think the advantages are outweighed by the disadvantages. PowerPoint presentations do not allow students to prepare topics in significant detail, unless they try to pack large paragraphs of information into each slide. This encourages students to reduce their content into simple bullet points and headlines. Sure, they can elaborate on their topic while presenting the information...but the majority of the students in the audience may lose focus, not have enough time to copy the extra information, and as a result, do not gain as much knowledge from the presentation.

PowerPoint presentations are typically dull, monotonous, and do not encourage student interaction. The only opportunity provided for students to show some creativity are pre-programmed into the software already; students pick from predesigned templates, color schemes, fonts, etc. PowerPoint does not offer students a true chance to demonstrate their own knowledge, creativity, and higher level thinking skills. I feel that its use in the classroom should be limited, if used at all.

Microsoft Word

The only time I ever used Microsoft Word in my own classroom experience, both high school and college, was to type essays... talk about boring! I never thought of Word as anything other than simply a writing tool, with the occasional graphic to spice up an article. When I began my student teaching last year in the Rochester City School District, I learned some pretty cool features of Word that can easily be incorporated into any classroom.

If you are lucky enough to have a SmartBoard in your classroom, then you can have extra fun with Word! My second graders LOVED learning and practicing their math skills through this technology. If you have a SmartBoard, you can make Microsoft Word interactive with you students. One of their favorite activities involved counting money. First, before the students arrived for school, I would open some clip art pictures of money into a word document - pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters. I would make sure that there was a numerous amount of each coin available for the students. Next, I would make four jean pockets from clip art, one for each type of coin. When the students would arrive, they would have a morning routine that we would complete every morning on the classroom carpet. Money and counting skills was part of this routine. I would give them various amounts of money and ask them to put coins into the coinciding pockets to make that amount. To do this, all they had to do was go up to the board and physically drag the coin into its pocket with their finger. For instance, if I asked them to make $0.75, they could put 3 quarters in the quarters pocket, 10 dimes and 1 nickel into their respective pockets, 2 quarters, 2 dimes, and 1 nickel into the pockets, and so on. The students loved this interactive activity of physically dragging the money into the pockets, and it dramatically improved their money counting skills!

This was just one fun way of using Microsoft Word in the classroom. I think it is really important to offer a variety of ways for your students to use Word, not just when they have to write an essay. Students could also explore Word on their own and see what interesting features they can find!

Social Media in the Classroom

In this day and age, students are more familiar with media than most of their teachers. As a teacher, why not use that to your advantage? In order to get students to learn, teachers first need to engage them in the subject matter and make them care about what they are learning...what better way to do that than to use social media? There are thousands of ways that teachers can be creative and use social media appropriately in their classrooms to promote student learning. For example, you can have each student create a private Twitter account for a particular character from history and have a classroom debate on a historical issue through the web. This is a great way to include those students' opinions who may not like speaking up in front of their peers. Through the anonymity of a Twitter feed, they may feel more comfortable to post their honest ideas and feelings about a particular issue rather than voicing their thoughts in front of the whole class. If used appropriately and effectively, social media has endless benefits to enhance student engagement and learning in the classroom.

Students also need to actually learn how to use social media. They need to learn about things like online privacy and cyberbullying before they create social media accounts; unfortunately many students do not understand the true hazards that social media entails. In this age of the Internet, is it the teacher's responsibility to teach them about these things? Maybe not, but if the students are at least being exposed to these issues in the safe environment of a classroom then they can learn to take more precautions at home.

We can't avoid using technology in the classroom any longer. The world is constantly advancing technology and, whether we like it or not, this is the age of technology. Five-year-olds have iPhones and ten-year-olds have laptops... it is time to face that reality. Technology does not need to take over the classroom..it shouldn't! But there are so many ways that technology can be incorporated into the classroom to enhance learning and engagement. Our students do not know anything besides technology; this is the world they have grown up in. As teachers, we must embrace what they know, educate ourselves, and use these tools to further our own teaching practices.