The value of WebQuests for teaching and learning is that they give students the chance to explore real-world problem solving skills in a way that presents pondering questions to them as well as allows them to work through a tutorial in order to learn these problem solving skills.
Tom March, creator of www.ozline.com, said in his article Why WebQuests (http://tommarch.com/writings/intro_wq.php) that,
“When students are asked to understand, hypothesize or problem-solve an issue that confronts the real world, they face an authentic task, not something that only carries meaning in a school classroom. Although you can't count on getting a response, when students do receive feedback from someone they didn't previously know, they join a community of learners and have their presence, if not their contribution, validated. When teachers choose a topic they know their students would respond to, they add to the relevance.” (1998)
I believe that WebQuests will greatly increase the motivation of students to learn because they present students with the opportunity of self-learning and are often more motivating when they are student-centered. Also, WebQuests often help students to create a community with their peers and thus feed off of each others desire to learn.
In this article found at: http://webquest.bmf.edu.hk/webquest/discol/essay/essay3_lfl_a.pdf, Zhou Yuxia concludes that WebQuests are designed to be self-learning and encourage students to reach for a higher level of skills through education. Although more research in this area is needed, through case studies it seems as though students do so when they encounter WebQuests that are less like traditional classroom teachings (i.e. lecturing).
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Discussion on Discussion Boards
One of the benefits to using discussion boards in a class is that this type of learning tool gives students the opportunity to interact with each other on a more personal level which then fosters more knowledge sharing opportunities between peers and thus could bring about a student with increased motivation to learn.
One way that I could use a discussion board in my “classroom” would be to have “students” post challenging questions to peers for a week and the person that comes up with the correct answer first would be given a small prize (the youth centre is all about giving out prizes). Another way that discussion boards could be used at the youth centre is to communicate with members of other youth centres in Nunavut about what programs are going on in their communities and have visitors to Computer Access Program (CAP) sites share knowledge.
Some of the challenges that teachers may face when using the discussion board tool for teaching and learning is that: students could easily get off subject if not monitored regularly, written communication is not as easily interpreted as verbal communication and thus some people may be misunderstood (i.e. sarcasm), some students may not be as timely in their responses as others and thus will hold back the class, and information may not always be correctly supplied by students.
One way that I could use a discussion board in my “classroom” would be to have “students” post challenging questions to peers for a week and the person that comes up with the correct answer first would be given a small prize (the youth centre is all about giving out prizes). Another way that discussion boards could be used at the youth centre is to communicate with members of other youth centres in Nunavut about what programs are going on in their communities and have visitors to Computer Access Program (CAP) sites share knowledge.
Some of the challenges that teachers may face when using the discussion board tool for teaching and learning is that: students could easily get off subject if not monitored regularly, written communication is not as easily interpreted as verbal communication and thus some people may be misunderstood (i.e. sarcasm), some students may not be as timely in their responses as others and thus will hold back the class, and information may not always be correctly supplied by students.
Cyber Bullying: It needs to be addressed
Over the last year, one of the main concerns at the Youth Centre that I run has been with our Computer Access Program (CAP) Site. It seems as though the visitors to our site have been, among other things, practicing cyber bullying. As the youth centre is a big place and we do not have funding for a position to concentrate only on the CAP site, this often comes to our attention when it is almost too late to do anything.
With that being said, something that must be understood about the way of life here in the north is that “only the fittest will survive.” It has always been the way of life here to take care of your family first and then whatever you had left over was shared with other families… no need to look to the future when you had to worry about surviving in the present. Children have always been taught that they need to be strong in order to survive, however, over the years it seems as though these children have taken this idea and come to conclude that in order to show that they are strong, they have to hurt others in the process.
To my knowledge, cyber bullying has harshly affected one teen in our community to the point that the teen upped and moved to another community. This is something that I would like to prevent in the future, as well as to guard from other more horrible things that come from this type of bullying. As this is the case, I thought to my self; “What is one of the most effective ways to communicate to the children here that cyber bullying is not okay?”
One of the ideas that I came up with was using the internet to find a good tool to communicate with…and what better than an animated YouTube video. Here is one that I found was done very well and was very helpful.
I am hoping to contact the elementary and high school here in Cape Dorset and ask them if I can do up a presentation about cyber bullying to present to the kids in the New Year. To me this is an issue that needs to be addressed by all members of our community and dealt with on a serious note before it gets out of hand and we have suicides occurring in result to bring cyber-bullied. The sad reality is…only when something like that happens will the community begin to take cyber bullying seriously.
With that being said, something that must be understood about the way of life here in the north is that “only the fittest will survive.” It has always been the way of life here to take care of your family first and then whatever you had left over was shared with other families… no need to look to the future when you had to worry about surviving in the present. Children have always been taught that they need to be strong in order to survive, however, over the years it seems as though these children have taken this idea and come to conclude that in order to show that they are strong, they have to hurt others in the process.
To my knowledge, cyber bullying has harshly affected one teen in our community to the point that the teen upped and moved to another community. This is something that I would like to prevent in the future, as well as to guard from other more horrible things that come from this type of bullying. As this is the case, I thought to my self; “What is one of the most effective ways to communicate to the children here that cyber bullying is not okay?”
One of the ideas that I came up with was using the internet to find a good tool to communicate with…and what better than an animated YouTube video. Here is one that I found was done very well and was very helpful.
I am hoping to contact the elementary and high school here in Cape Dorset and ask them if I can do up a presentation about cyber bullying to present to the kids in the New Year. To me this is an issue that needs to be addressed by all members of our community and dealt with on a serious note before it gets out of hand and we have suicides occurring in result to bring cyber-bullied. The sad reality is…only when something like that happens will the community begin to take cyber bullying seriously.
Thoughts on Online Assessment
Until my first year of university, I had never encountered a course that provided online assessment of the students work or tests. Although my high school was well off when it came to accessing technology (we had computers and programs to create yearbooks, etc.), the teachers never took advantage of online assessment (other than in computer class) to assess our learning. When I first encountered online assessment, I was not very fond of it. I have a bit of test writer’s anxiety, and the fact that I was being put into a completely different atmosphere and being tested a completely different way, well it flustered me to say the least. However, as the years have past, I have begun to get a little more comfortable with it but am still not very fond of it.
I believe that online assessment will become a very helpful and useful assessment style for teachers in the future but at this moment I do not believe that it is very practical. In the Designing online assessment of student learning article (Segrave & Rice, 2003) some of the advantages that are said to come with online assessment are: flexibility of assessment (who can do the assessing and what they can assess), quicker feedback (through automatic marking and on-screen feedback comments after tests), and more effective assessment (in regards to better integration of assessment throughout the course and being able to assess more from what has been taught).
Even though these are great advances for assessment in general, there are still many problems with the style of assessing.
Some reasons that Segrave and Rice (2003) put forth in their article and also why I believe that society is not yet ready for this type of assessment is because of the problems in relation to: authentication, fraud, security, logistics, high monetary costs and system reliability. As well, I believe that this type of assessment does not take into account the level of it’s disruption to those who have test writers anxiety.
Schools who use online assessment are looking into most of these problems and have taken steps to ensure that online assessment is being used properly (such as having back up labs for times of overflow and making sure that students have their student ID cards with them when they come in to take a test to verify that they are who they say they are) however, it seems that they don’t take much into account when it comes to the troubles that individuals could face when suddenly they are having to deal with changes in the way they learn and the environments they feel comfortable with.
When it comes to my test writers anxiety, I find that online assessment makes it worse because there are: no fixed locations (which means no familiarity with where you do your online assessment to where you learnt the material), fixed time limit (often represented as a countdown on a corner of your screen which tends to distract from the task at hand and add pressure), and different sounds in these environments (i.e. the clicking of keyboards, music from tests, clicking of mice, humming of the computers, squeaks of rolling chairs), and less personal initiative (finding time and motivation to get to the labs and do the tests in a timely manner).
I believe that online assessment will become a very helpful and useful assessment style for teachers in the future but at this moment I do not believe that it is very practical. In the Designing online assessment of student learning article (Segrave & Rice, 2003) some of the advantages that are said to come with online assessment are: flexibility of assessment (who can do the assessing and what they can assess), quicker feedback (through automatic marking and on-screen feedback comments after tests), and more effective assessment (in regards to better integration of assessment throughout the course and being able to assess more from what has been taught).
Even though these are great advances for assessment in general, there are still many problems with the style of assessing.
Some reasons that Segrave and Rice (2003) put forth in their article and also why I believe that society is not yet ready for this type of assessment is because of the problems in relation to: authentication, fraud, security, logistics, high monetary costs and system reliability. As well, I believe that this type of assessment does not take into account the level of it’s disruption to those who have test writers anxiety.
Schools who use online assessment are looking into most of these problems and have taken steps to ensure that online assessment is being used properly (such as having back up labs for times of overflow and making sure that students have their student ID cards with them when they come in to take a test to verify that they are who they say they are) however, it seems that they don’t take much into account when it comes to the troubles that individuals could face when suddenly they are having to deal with changes in the way they learn and the environments they feel comfortable with.
When it comes to my test writers anxiety, I find that online assessment makes it worse because there are: no fixed locations (which means no familiarity with where you do your online assessment to where you learnt the material), fixed time limit (often represented as a countdown on a corner of your screen which tends to distract from the task at hand and add pressure), and different sounds in these environments (i.e. the clicking of keyboards, music from tests, clicking of mice, humming of the computers, squeaks of rolling chairs), and less personal initiative (finding time and motivation to get to the labs and do the tests in a timely manner).
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