Webquest: Design a task for students

This is an interesting webquest for 11th Grade students designed by Vanessa Cremona. The task in the webquest is to ask students to choose one favoriate movie and introduce it to the whole class and persuade them to watch it. Through doing this task, students will practice their reading, writing, speaking and develop some relevant communication skills.

link: http://www.idea-ti.ch/webquest/vanessa/index.htm

Value

• The webquest will foster students' learning autonomy. They can search the relevant movie resources, newspaper reports and others' reviews after class.
• The task in the webquest gives students a lot of freedom to choose the material and use the target language.
• When students finish the task, they will develop their speaking, reading, and writing skill as well as communication and presentation skill.
• The topic of the task is interesting and strongly associated with students' daily life, which will increase their motivation to do it.
• The webquest contains clear instruction of the task which allows students to complete the task independently.
• The evaluation form is clear, which guides students to complete the task based on a certain criteria.
• The given task process is divided into several steps, which leads students to plan their procedure resonablely and arrange their time appropriately. Additionally, the process page provides students some useful links and information about the task.
• Teacherpage is good for teacher to refer to and evaluate students' work and outcome.

Usage

• Teacher introduces the topic of the webquest or plays a movie clip for students in order to motivate students to involve in the following task through a warm-up activity.
• Then teacher asks students to use the webquest, meanwhile, teacher should give some more detailed and specific instruction about the different processes of the task and provide some alternative resourses that students can use.
• Teacher ask students to brainstorm the movie they want to introduce and have a group discussion about the relevant background knowledge about it.
• Teacher can either ask students to do the task on several classes and monitor their performance or ask them to complete it after class.
• When students finish the task and do the presentation in public, teacher should give effective feedback or ask their peers to provide feedback based on the given evaluation form.

Limitation

• It might be a huge load for a student to do the task individually.
• There are not many relevant sources, such as links and pictures available for students.
• Too simple layout is unlikely to be attractive for young students.