Internet Based Projects: Webquests

Undoubtedly internet is playing a major role in today’s learning processes. Students use it on a daily basis to play and interact with friends. Thus, teachers must find a way to include it in the classroom and in what we ask our students to do. A good way to do so is working with Internet-based projects.

This kind of projects foster peer interaction and cooperative learning. Planning them can be time consuming, but it is definitely worth it. They can be adapted to many situations, long or short term, topics and can be both for language learning and inter-disciplinary purposes.

According to Dudeney & Hockly (2007), there are a several questions to be considered:

- Choosing a project topic: will learners investigate a person, an event or a topic?

- Making the task clear: what information do they need to find?

- Finding resources: what sites will learners visit? Do they have the information the learners need?

- Deciding the outcome: what is the final purpose/product of their project?

There are many kinds of Interne-based projects: low to high level projects, internet-based simulations, WebQuests, etc. It is always worth checking in different sites to see if you find some project you find suitable (teachnology, webquestcreator2).

We will explore WebQuests and I will provide an example created for English learners under the topic of ‘Endangered Animals’. WebQuests can be defined by mini-projects in the input comes from the internet.

Here you can find a WebQuest I've created where you can see this theory brought to real life.

References:

N. (2007). How to Teach English with Technology Book and CD-ROM Pack by Dudeney, Mr Gavin, Hockly, Ms Nicky (2007) Paperback. Longman.