Webquest

I had never heard of webquests before until today. There are so many different and neat things you can do with them. One thing about them though is that the links to websites for information become out of date. As a teacher, that would mean we would need to continually check and update the sites if we plan to continually use the webquest year after year. As an early childhood educator I thought about creating a webquest for parents. I know I could adapt the criteria so that it would fit their needs, but the designs seems like it works better for students. What I decided to do instead is create a webquest for my kindergarten students that parents can help them navigate through. Part of the science core for kindergarten:
Standard 3
Students will develop an understanding of their environment.
Objective 1
Investigate changes in the seasons.

1. identify the seasons and represent each with pictures and songs.
2. Observe and describe typical weather for each of the seasons.
3. Describe the information each of the five senses provides with the changing of seasons.
4. Observe and describe changes in behavior of animals as the seasons change.
5. Describe how people change their behavior as the seasons change.

I'm thinking my task will include resources for links to educational games that children can play while they learn and explore the different seasons. I haven't decided exactly what the task would be, but something the students could produce and bring into class to share. If you have any ideas that would be great let me know!

Website Evaluation

I found this evaluation to be very helpful. It is great for elementary age students to be able to evaluate websites on their own. I decided to evaluate pbskids.org because as an early childhood education major I wanted to see how useful/effective it was for younger students. I have a five-year-old brother in kindergarten right now and he plays on pbskids.org all the time. He has the website memorized because they say it all the time on TV.


This particular evaluation I used is more centered around finding out if the website is a good resource for a project or not. Of course a kindergarten student is probably not going to be looking for a website for information, but some of the questions were still helpful for evaluating it. Such as: are there big pictures on the page? Is the spelling correct on the page? Is there a picture on the page that you can use to choose links? If there are photographs do they look real? If there are sounds do they sound real? These were some really good questions to evaluate the form of the website, which is more prevalent when evaluating websites for young students.


The second evaluation I used was the WAVE site that evaluates a website based on accessibility. It only found two accessibility errors. I think this is pretty good. It only has a slight problem with some alternate text that would probably be a little confusing with a screen reader. I think this website is mostly ideal because some good websites have as many as fifty errors. They may be good websites, but not very accessible.