Product Design Summary for a Web Quest

¶ … product design summary for a web quest that teaches 5th grade students how to build a web page using Microsoft Word

In recent years, web quests have been used to great effect by educators with the purpose of giving students the ability to search the World Wide Web for instructional as well as entertaining information. The web quest format allows students to employ an interactive form of knowledge seeking with a visual, audio, and verbal component. The importance of instructing students in the use of the web as a tool that can be deployed to educate through the use of technology and to connect students to the world has not always been deployed to its full potential, partly because of a certain level of teacher discomfort with computers, partly because of certain district's technical limitations, and partly because the nature of the information available on the web has only recently become expansive and appropriate for young persons.

First of all, what is a web quest? Ideally, web quests "are designed to use learners' time well, to focus on using information rather than looking for it, and to support learners' thinking at the levels of analysis, synthesis and evaluation." (Dodge, 2004) The quest usually involves an introduction, a task, and virtual information sources, that a group or individual student deploys through the use of a single or multiple disciplines. (Dodge, 1993) In this case, the project will actually use a 'web quest' format to create a new product on the web in the form of a web page for a fifth grade class

Needs Assessment web quest that teaches students at this grade level how to build a web page using Microsoft Word would meet the goal of enabling these students to become more comfortable and creative as well as more fluent in the use of information seeking and creating technology. (Schrock, 2004) It is crucial that younger students can integrate technology and search techniques into student's learning 'tool kits' at an early age, as well as make use of the web during their social time. The danger for some students in some communities is that they will become unfamiliar with technology. The danger for other students is that the web will simply be a source of amusement, rather than information and creativity. A web page is creative and personal, and using a web quest is a way to enable students to become more comfortable with technology.

Section II: Three Performance Objectives of the Project

Performance Objective 1: Students will find currently existing web quest formats and web pages designed by classes of their age group on the web that they enjoy using and have proved useful in past research. They will be able to articulate and define why they liked these tools.

Performance Objective 2: Students will make use of web creating technology on Microsoft Word by logging onto the web and creating concrete and observable web pages on the Internet. They will determine the subject of the page, after learning on the web, how to assemble a simple web page via the web quest format. District permitting, the web page created by the fifth grade class could be located on the school's own web page, accessible through a link.

Performance Objective 3: Students will be able to creatively use the web for their own class web page regarding a subject the class as a whole both enjoys and has educational merit.

Section III: Learner Analysis

For a fifth grader, the learner characteristics of the student at this level will be such that the student will be able to read well enough to make use of simple, directed data, but in a highly concrete fashion. In other words, focusing on data that is physical in nature might be superior for the site of the content of the web that is eventually derived. For instance, students can construct a website regarding the rehearsal and production process of a class play or a class craft project like how to build a jack-o-lantern, making use of photographs of the class and information about the history of drama or Halloween, for example, for young people, accessed on the web.

By the end of the project, the learner demonstrate, before conducting a 'web quest,' how to create concrete data via photographs and short labels, and then to make use of Microsoft Word technology to put these works into text and art. Then, the web quest will give students ideas how to put such material on the web as well as ideas to make such data interesting, well organized, and through search engines, informative.