Week Six: WebQuests

I was very interested in this week's assignment because I was very unfamiliar with WebQuests.  I had heard a couple of my fellow teachers talk about them briefly a few years back, but never really asked a lot of questions as to what they were and how they were used by students and teachers.  I had no idea how many ready-made WebQuests were already out there.  I had a good time just searching through other WebQuests that I could potentially use in my classroom.  I found lots of good information that I hope to use in the future with my students.  There were lots of WebQuests created for kindergarten students.  Many of them required parent assistance, but some seemed that they would be used in the classroom.  If this is the case, there would have to be a lot of up front teaching and modeling on how to use WebQuests for this age students. 
I decided to create my WebQuest to be used as an at home project with parent assistance.  I am hoping to use my WebQuest with my students towards the beginning of the year since the objective is learning letter sounds.  This is something we work on all year in kindergarten, but using this WebQuest would be a great way to jumpstart this learning. 
You can find my WebQuest here : http://questgarden.com/127/66/5/110608193200/

Thank goodness Dr. Goldberg prepared us by telling us this would be a time consuming project, because I had no idea how much time it took to create a complete webquest.  Time and knowledge were definitely my two biggest challenges going into this week.  I had to read the websites on how to create a webquest multiple times to really get a grasp on what I was supposed to be doing.  Even then, it was somewhat of a trial and error process for me.  I did a lot of creating and then going back to edit what I had done to make things better.  I also thought it was a big challenging to find good, educational, online activities that were interactive for students to complete in the WebQuest.  After getting started and feeling like I had the hang of it, I enjoyed putting it all together.  I was glad we used the quest garden website because it was very straightforward and took you through step by step for what needed to be done in creating a complete WebQuest.  This assignment was a great learning experience for me, and I look forward to learning even more about WebQuests and creating more of them in the future to use in my own classroom.