Aug

18

WebQuests the easy way

Filed Under General 

In days of yore knights would go on quests to win treasure, or, more interestingly, the attentions of a fair maiden. They’d fight villians, and dragons and brave untold dangers.

Well, there’s not a lot of knights now a days (unless you count Sir Elton John) but quests don’t have to stop. One of the most popular quests for a teacher is a “webquest” where you send your students off hunting for specific information somewhere on the Internet. You send your students to different sites and have them track down various facts relevant to whatever you happen to be teaching.

But how do you organize your quest so that students make it to the right sites with a minimum of fuss and bother? Ideally you set up a webpage and have the kids go to that, but, let’s be realistic, most of us don’t know how to do that. Enter TrackStar which provides one cool and easy way to do webquests.

You go to their site, and register for free. You then set up a “track” which allows you to enter the URLs/addresses of the sites you want your students to go to. You can enter the questions for each site just below each of the URLs. The great part is you can set up your entire track or quest without knowing a single bit of HTML for webpage making. When you’re done, your track is given a unique web address and you can direct your students there.

This way the kids need only one address to go to instead of 5 or 10 or more, minimizing the chances of them making a mistake and going to the wrong place on the Net. We’ve all typed in URLs and made simple and really annoying mistakes. Imagine having 25 kids do that with ten different addresses.  That’s about 250 possible wrong addresses. Setting up your webquest with TrackStar really should make your life simpler.

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