Web Quest

Web Quest is basically a way to put your assignments, or lesson plans online for everyone to see. It is a way to share with the students what their activity is going to be without having to lecture, and allowing them to use technology to learn about their lesson. For our assignment we created a quest in which the children played detective, and had to search for all the letter A's. One thing I liked about the webquest was that you could put pictures and writing creatively and the children could go through the assignment step by step. One thing I disliked is that depending on what computer you were using, depended on how much you could do. For example my partner and I were working on the same project, same website, her computer could upload the photos, whereas my computer (the mac) could not up load the same photos. So that was somewhat frustrating. In the classroom I would use web quest to share with the students an exciting lesson that I had planned. I would allow them to go through the web quest on their own, and assist along the way to ensure that understood. By allowing them to go through it on their own, it would show me that the students could understand step by step directions by reading and looking at pictures. Also by allowing them to go through webquest they would use technology on their own.

Timeline

Today in class we worked with timelines. Using a free online source we were able to create a timeline with different dates, events and designs. One thing I liked was that there were different borders you could use for the timelines, so you could make it to your own liking. One thing that I disliked was that the site did not automatically organize the dates in order, so if you made a change, or added a date, you had to fix everything in order on your own. You could use timelines online in class for many different ways. You could use it as an icebreaker such as what we did to get the students to share something about themselves, they could use as a follow up activity to a story or literature reading, or they could use it in social studies for many different things.

The www.xtimeline.com seemed to be a little more complicated, but at the same time there was so much more you could do with it. You could add pictures, and edit, where as with the other timeline it was very limited on what you could add. I liked the xtimeline better just because you could add pictures and edit more. I think the xtimeline would be best for older students that are a little more comfortable with technology.