Evolution of Inventions - August 31, 2006

Today's QuestGarden featured webquest looks at inventions, and challenges students to trace the evolution of that invention - from idea to realization. TITLE: Evolution of Inventions AUTHOR: Leslie Eaves LINK: Link to Evolution of Inventions Webquest Once again, we have a webquest that makes great use of QuestGarden's seamless image integration. As noted before, well-placed, relevant images make a huge impact on the end-user. This webquest requires students to complete a PowerPoint presentation on an invention of their choice, and the "Evaluation" section lays out precise, detailed expectations for the final product. Here are more web resources on inventions from the K12 Station Libraries.

Immigration in Focus - August 30, 2006

Our first featured Webquest looks at American immigration. Here is a scaled-down screenshot of the webquest's introductory page: One of the nicest aspects of QuestGarden is the ability to seamlessly integrate image content into your webquests. It's easy - I'll cover the "how-to" in a later post. As you can see from the above screenshot, this author included some nice photos ... this makes the webquest much more visually appealing to users (particularly students). Here is how to access this webquest: TITLE: Immigration in Focus AUTHOR: Joe Menkin, Newbury Park High School LINK: Link to Focus on Immigration And here is a link to a library of resources on American immigration: K12Station Immigration History Links

Introduction to Webquests on QuestGarden

This blog highlights the best Webquests created using the QuestGarden webquest building environment. If you haven't heard of QuestGarden yet, it's the brainchild of Webquest Guru Bernie Dodge. I could explain QuestGarden, but I'll bet that Bernie can do a better job on his own: QuestGarden is an online authoring tool, community and hosting service that is designed to make it easier and quicker to create a high quality WebQuest. No knowledge of web editing or uploading is required. Prompts, guides and examples are provided for each step of the process. Images, worksheets and other documents can easily be attached or embedded in the WebQuest, and users have complete control over the appearance of the final lesson. QuestGarden is modeled after a community garden with all the resources needed to bring great WebQuests to life. Users are encouraged to comment on each others' work, to share links and images, and to build new WebQuests on existing ones. Rather than starting from scratch, users can bring a WebQuest written by another member of the community into their workspace, modify the content or appearance to suit their needs, and use it with their own students. Attribution to the first author is maintained, and authors are notified when another member of the community makes an improved or modified version of their work. Thanks, Bernie! Here's a link to the QuestGarden site: QuestGarden Each week, I'll select a few "state of the art" Webquests from QuestGarden, discuss them, and post links to them here. I hope that this will help you to discover how to use Webquests in your classroom, and hopefully it will inspire you to create a Webquest of your own!