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A WebQuery for xth Grade

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Introduction

This document should be written with the student as the intended audience. Write a short paragraph here to introduce the activity or lesson to the students. If there is a role or scenario involved (e.g., "You are a detective trying to identify the mysterious poet.") then here is where you'll set the stage. If there's no motivational intro like that, use this section to provide a short advance organizer or overview. Remember that the purpose of this section is to both prepare and hook the reader. Make it fun and interesting and you'll get your students excited.

It is also in this section that you'll communicate the Big Question (Essential Question, Guiding Question) that the whole WebQuery is centered around.

Task

Describe crisply and clearly what the end result of the learners' activities will be. What will the final product be? Will students have choices? Do you have particular requirements such as number of pages, size of poster, length of presentation, etc?

The task could be a:

problem or mystery to be solved;
product to be designed;
personal insight to be articulated;
summary to be created;
persuasive message or journalistic account to be crafted;
a creative work, or
anything that requires the learners to process and transform the information they've gathered.

Don't list the prompts that students will consider to get to the end point. They belong in the Process section.

If you’re interested in exploring Open Inquiry (not simply guided inquiry) with your WebQuery, you’ll want to devise a way of having students develop their own research task. A few different methods of doing this include:

* Giving students a list of questions and letting them choose one.
* Providing a general topic area with a list of relevant resources and prompting students to develop researchable tasks that relate to them.

The Process

The basic idea here is to replace the teacher-directed process usually found in a WebQuest, with a set of generic prompts to support students in devising their own research process. What sort of prompts would a teacher pose as they circulated around the room, helping students on their projects, without giving away any answers? Think “scaffolding" not "recipe" . . .

You are encouraged to adapt the following list to your own purposes. You might want to make it more age-appropriate or more closely aligned with a particular task, product, or topic. This list is generic and simply deals with the "how-to" of completing an assigned research task.

What sort of answer does the task require?
Can the task be broken down into a few smaller tasks?
If this is a group project, how can the smaller tasks be divided among the group members?
Where should you start?
What kinds of information will you need?
Where can you find it?
What can you tell about the quality of the web resources? Are these facts or opinions? What about the authority of the author?
How can the info you find be organized or displayed to make it useful?
Will a graph, concept map, or picture help?
What patterns can you detect in the information you have collected? Any similarities or differences that are important?
Is something missing? Certain perspectives?
What will you need to create on your own to complete the task?
Do you have enough information to complete the task?
If not, what else is needed?
Once you have all of the info you need, what is the best way to use it and complete the task?
Have you checked the rubric and task to make sure that you have completed all aspects of the task?

Resources

Use this space to point out places on the Internet (or physical resources in the classroom) that will be available for the learners to use to accomplish the task. Embedding the links within a description of the resource will also assist your learners to know in advance what they're clicking on. Although there are five links below, you may have more or less than five -- depending on what is required by your WebQuery. If you are working with very young children or the task is to be conducted fairly quickly, you can reduce the number of links. If your students are older or the task requires more time to complete, increase the number of links. Also, the more choice you give your students in terms of their task the greater the number of links they will need.

Link Title Here describe it
Link Title Here describe it
Link Title Here describe it
Link Title Here describe it
Link Title Here describe it

Evaluation

Describe to the learners how their performance will be evaluated. Provide students with a clear understanding of the grading criteria which will be used to evaluate their project.

A rubric is always a good idea. You might want to consider using Rubistar to construct your own with relative ease.

In addition, if the WebQuery is a group project, specify whether there will be a common grade for group work vs. individual grades.

You may find that providing more than one rubric is helpful if you intend to give students a choice in how they present their work. For example: one rubric could be provided for a written product and another for a class presentation.

Conclusion

Put a couple of sentences here that summarize what students will have accomplished or learned by completing this activity or lesson. You might also include some rhetorical questions or additional links to encourage them to extend their thinking into other content beyond this lesson.

We all benefit by being generous with our work. Permission is hereby granted for other educators to copy this WebQuery, update or otherwise modify it, and post it elsewhere provided that the original author's name is retained along with a link back to the original URL of this WebQuery. On the line after the original author's name, you may add "Modified by (your name) on (date)". If you do modify it, please let me know and provide the new URL.

This template is based on the original WebQuest template.

To learn more about WebQuery, visit The WebQuery Page.