When I began thinking about my first webquest, I was unsure of the topic I would cover. I wanted my topic to be one I could use sometime in the future and I wanted the topic to be interesting and informative. After some careful thought, I decided to work with copyright, fair use and public domain. These topics tends to be misunderstood by administration, staff and students alike
After weeding through a ton of information and narrowing down my thoughts, I decided to create four unique roles. The roles I decided on are administration, instructional technology facilitator, teacher and student. I decided to include a student role since more, more students are using technology to create projects, and the tendency students have with the belief that everything on the web is free and available to the public domain. I also believe having students involved, the creation of a copyright policy will be more credible.
Groups of four will work together and each person will be required to select a role that closely resembles their responsibilities. Each role is responsible for researching the topics listed in the webquest document by role type. At the conclusion of the research period, the group will get together to discuss their findings. A link to a copyright quiz is supplied in the resources section of the webquest to help direct the group discussion and keep the discussion focused. Once the group discussion has finished, the group will use the Glogster EDU application to create an artistic and informative poster that to post around copiers, libraries and computer labs.
After laying out my draft, I needed to create my website using one of the free web 2.0 website creation tools. Being opened minded and wanting to learn as much as I could about different technologies, I decided to work in the MAC environment for the entire project. I decided to develop my website using the iMac tool and Bravenet to create and upload my site. After a long weekend and many hours of site design and playing with HTML tables, the site looked great and I was ready to publish. I decided I was not going to take the easy way out so I worked on publishing my site using Bravenet. The process required may steps but was not bad. After some effort, I was able to post my site.
After testing my site, I found some errors. The most discouraging problem was the assessment table I created using html. I think of myself as a good html developer but the tool had other thoughts. After making some html changes, I tried to upload my site again but could not. I tried for a few hours and was not successful and I am not sure why. I never received any errors except that it would not post. To save time and the fact that my projected needed to be completed, I created another site using MobileMe. Uploading to MobilMe was a fun and easy process; however, the site tool did not accept the html code. I tried for many, many hours to change the code and nothing worked so I had to change my approach and create a document page instead.
Being a Windows PC person my entire career, the site creation process was a bit frustrating but I was determined. By the end of the weekend, I was happy with my progress, I learned a lot about the MAC and did not divert back to the PC.
Colleen, I really like the idea of how you created your Webquest using the four components that you did-- administration, technology coordinator, teacher and student. I'm interested in checking it out, because like many, I was never truly informed about copyright, fair use and public domain. I am also impressed with how much you know about using HTML. It is a foreign language to me, and you should be very proud of yourself for working so well with it, regardless of how long and frustrating it may have been. Our failures make way for our successes!
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