New technologies in English teaching and learning: WEBQUEST

The WEBQUEST is a tool created by the professor of Educational Technology Bernie Dodge. Its goal is to assign students group/individual tasks and assigments that will be developed using the World Wide Web resources. This tool can be used by teachers at any aducational level and is a way to study in depth a certaint topic. The WEBQUEST requires the teacher's crativity in order to keep the students focused and to encourage the development of the assigned tasks or assessments.

The WEBQUEST is a didactic way to assign students an specific task. It provides clear intructions about what the student must do: there is an intro that explains the reason why the tasks is assigned and the purpose; the taks descriptions; the process of development of the task; the role of each student and their assigned work; description of the evaluatio, in group or individual; the conclusion provides a description of what the student must have done and learn after the task development; and aditional information the teacher considers important to be posted in the page. Here an example: http://www.teacherweb.com/IN/PNC/Cassady/index.html
http://www.iwebquest.com/egypt/ancientegypt.htm

This task, as we said before, can be assigned in groups or individualy. The tasks assigned can be evaluated through the WEBQUEST ifself or in class, it depends on the teacher.

What can be the advantages or disadvantages of this tool.

As advantages we can hightly:
- It develops students sense of responsibility.
- It contributes to develop research strategies and ability in the area.
- Encourage student to achive the proposed goals and promotes team work.
- Focuses students in the real use of the internet and gives a new vision of how usefull can it be in their learning process.
- It keeps student's interest in their learning process even during the out class time.

Disadvantages:
- If you want to work in class must be sure there are enough computers to work and a good internet provider, in order to avoid lost of time.
- Because it is a kind of "self-supervision" work, it can achieve the opposite goal that is loss of interest and irresponsibility with the work.
- If it is not attractive enough or clear in instructions, can be a boring and difficult task to achieve.
- It requires a lot of responsability and conscientious work of the teacher, who must provide safe and interesting links to develop the task. If there is not, students could get lost in the web.


Implementation Ideas

For those teachers who love projects is an ideal tool in order to guide these kind of activities. The use of internet can motivate and increase student's interest in their project development.

It can be applied to motivate the use of english out of class. Assigning tasks through a WEBQUEST, teachers can motivate and promote the english language review as well as it helps students to improve the language learning while working in their interest pages.

Lesson on values

This is the first of three lessons proposed to work on values in the classroom. We chose Religion as a topic because it involves respect for the others and their believes and tolerance tolerance among other values that are important to be developed in class in order to help student to achieve a better undestanding of their social environment.

Activity 3A: Task planning

Step one: Why ethics and values? Because during the learning process it is important to form a good behaviour in the learners in order to have an appropriate learning environment of respect and order. It is also important in a Foreign Language Learning process to reinforce different values that will help the understanding of a foreign culture as well as the own.

The role of values and ethics in education is to open learners’ mind in order to accept the differences in a society such as religion believes, races, customs, and politics ideologies and so on. Its place is every single subject the learner has, extracurricular activities and at home.

Step two: Where can we look for meaningful topics? We can look for meaningful topics in the Colombian General Education Law. In the Estándares Básicos de Competencias en Lenguas Extranjeras: Ingles del Ministerio de Educación Nacional we can find the following standards about ethics and values.

Participo en situaciones comunicativas cotidianas tales como pedir favores, disculparme y agradecer (MEN document on Standards, p.23).

Expreso de manera sencilla lo que me gusta y disgusta respecto a algo (MEN document on Standards, p.23).

Identifico elementos culturales presentes en textos sencillos (MEN document on Standards, p.24).

Demuestro que reconozco elementos de la cultura extranjera y los relaciono con mi cultura (MEN document on Standards, p.25).
Step three: Brainstorming for meaningful topics: religion, laws, social differences, racism, world wars, world conflicts, and so on.

Step four: Selecting topics and designing tasks

Step five: Actual lesson planning: first class has six steps for being developed in fifty minutes.

Step One: Teacher divides the class in six groups of five students each one (one minute).

Step Two: Teacher gives to each group one envelop with some pieces of paper that form a definition of the word “religion.” Each group has a different definition but they do not know what it is about; they have to organize the sentence (four minutes).

Step Three: Once everybody has the right definition, they have to write it down on the board and after reading all the definitions the whole class must find out the word that belongs to those definitions (five minutes).

Step Four: Teacher asks students if they agree with those definitions and proposes them, working in the same groups, to write their own definition of religion (five minutes).

Step Five: Each group read its definition and the whole class discuss about them (fifteen minutes).

Step Six: Teacher asks what religion students know and does a brainstorming (twenty minutes).