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.