Web Quest 2

What?

I am learning how to make a Web Quest. Right now, we are adding to our basic Web Quests and using skills like hyperlink and other tools to make the navigation process more effective.

So What?

As a teacher, this information will help me prepare organized lesson plans. As a student, this will help me reach my goals of becoming a more prepared teacher, by going into the field with loads of ideas and ways to organize those lesson plan ideas so that they are useful. As a colleague, having web quests will help my fellow-employees to borrow my lessons and hopefully add to them and share back with me how to make them better. We are doing this to become better teachers, with more media resources to organize and effectively teach large lesson units with specific instruction and information. In my other classes, this will help me to be aware of the kinds of organizational methods there are to plan a lesson. In my life, this can be helpful to me because I am becoming more familiar with basic technology skills. I use technology daily, and I like to make creative projects/gifts, so I am becoming more technology savvy, which is great.

To me, this technology means that there are endless options to create valuable, teachable, and creative lessons. That makes me happy. I want to be a super awesome teacher. Whatever skills and specific methods I can learn to do that-- bring 'em on. Hopefully, my colleagues, whoever they may be in the future, have some great ideas and different media approaches. We can combine our lesson plans/ideas/tactics and become a superpower of teachers. I can see it now... No fear, Super Schlauder is here. Here come Super Schlauder(mac laptop symbol for her super hero symbol) and her pack super hero teachers!! Yes. This is going to be good.

Now What?

Technology has a negative connotation for a lot of more experienced teachers. It definitely has its cons, and I've seen teachers get so mad with overhead projectors, that they have hit it with their hand and shattered the glass. I have seen other teachers use technology so effectively that when it stopped working, they had no problem teaching it another way. They preferred a technological way, but they were so familiar with the way to teach that subject that they gracefully kept flying on through. So, we are learning how to make web quests, but if all goes wrong and suddenly the internet site for my web quest gets deleted, I will be better prepared by having organized it so effectively that I'll be able to pick up with it no problem. That situation represents an example where my schema would be changed for the better. I will be a more prepared teacher by having delved so deep into the organizational process by developing an all-encompassing lesson plan.

I can give my students an assignment about finding the latitude and longitude of places in the world they want to travel to by using google earth. I can preface this assignment with a web quest that allows the students to find out more about different countries in the world. Once they are familiar with the different options, they can have that 'hook' of interest that will allow them to give attention to other subjects like latitude and longitude. They can create a google doc with members in their group to do a collaborative research paper that includes their country(topic), its latitude and longitude, a picture of a city/area/neighborhood they might consider living in from google earth.

This will help me become a better teacher because I can use authentic tools that are used in real world daily jobs, careers, and social skills. It will help my students be more prepared for working effectively in their future positions. It will help my colleagues develop these same skills the students are learning.

I just planned a direct teaching lesson with media influence that was well organized and prepared. I feel way excited to give it tomorrow because I am confident and prepared. It is so nice not to have to rely on your brain, but you can rely on valid internet resources. It is easier to trust a latitude and longitude mapping system on-line rather than on a worksheet map, and it is more fun. It'll be a great presentation tomorrow. I'm sure of it.