The webquest March Madness is an interdisciplinary webquest. This
webquest is designed for 8th grade students. It appears that the
educational goals depend on the role of each student within the project.
There are four roles and they include the statistician, the athletic
director, public relations director, and athletic coach. Within these
roles each student has their own role in “their” basketball team making
it into the March Madness tournament. The overall goals for the
students is to be able to use technology to research various real life
scenarios such as finding airports and creating travel plans, finding
statistics, using a word processing program, and making predictions.
Once the students have found all of the information asked for the
students are asked to compile their results and create a group poster.
The webquest lists several curriculum standards addressed within this webquest. These standards include the following:
- CA - 1 Speaking and writing standard English (including grammar, usage, punctuation, spelling, capitalization)
- CA - Comprehending and evaluating the content and artistic aspects of oral and visual presentations
- Math -1 Addition, subtraction, multiplication and division; other number sense, including numeration and estimation; and the application of these operations and concepts in the workplace and other situations
- Math - 3 Data analysis, probability and statistics
- Social Studies - 5 The major elements of geographical study and analysis (such as location, place, movement, regions)
I
do not believe these standards really match up to the task of the
webquest. I agree the students will be using the CA standards by working
within groups and designing a poster that includes the written word.
However, the other standards have a very limited connection. The math
standards are barely examined by the students. The only role that
includes using mathematics in depth is the athletic director that has to
find the total cost of traveling. The statistician merely finds already
solved statistics, but does not use them for any sort of synthesizing.
Finally, the assistant coach merely adds up positive integers, but in an
applied manner. The social studies standards are also limited to two
roles and only include finding the location of places. There is no study
of regions or movement. Overall, I feel the majority of this project
based on the ability to use technology processes such as navigating the
world wide web and using programs to compile information. However, there
were no technology standards included.
Throughout this website there are several strategies used to have
students work collaboratively. Each student has their own role and
evaluated in their own ways, but is also evaluated on being able to
bring their information back to the group to create a final project.
With this incorporated into the evaluation I believe this would be an
effective group project. The webquest gives the idea that the students
really are in this situation and need to apply their skills to make it
successful. Although students are working independently through this
project, the teaching is deductive. The students are stepped through
each stage of the project and given the links needed to solve.
This webquest incorporates the use of finding information through the
world wide web and using word processing programs to display
information. The use of the web makes the project much easier to find
the information as a student. Most of the project could be completed by
printing out information, but then all the students would be doing is
copying information from one spot to another to create a poster. Most of
the upper level thinking of this project is being able to find the
information, but like I have previously stated, there are no standards
that include the use of technology or the ability to research.
This website has a few broken links, but the majority work. The few
links that are broken are posted to direct students toward information.
However, I believe the students would be able to find the information
fairly easily at an eighth grade level. It also directs students to fill
in tables, but the tables are unable to be filled in. The students
would need further direction on how to create the table in another place
such as a word processing program. Although, some information is broken
the webquest is not out of date. The website includes a theme that
happens annually that many students (and grown-ups) have a large
interest in. Although the data changes annually, the concepts stay the
same and can always be used.
The webquest includes a credits page where it gives credit to the
person who helped organize it. It also includes the program that allowed
the funding to have it created.
Although this webquest looks like it could be a lot of fun for the
students, there are many improvements that could be made to it. The
first change that I think needs to be made is a clearer focus on what
the students should be learning. Each student has completely different
tasks that includes different standards. Either the information should
stay the same and there should be a greater emphasis on technology
standards or there should be a stronger connection to the standards in
each discipline. If the emphasis was on technology the students could be
taught how to compile their information using technology programs such
as creating a website or using online resources such as Prezi or
Glogster. If the idea was to make a stronger connection to the standards
listed I would have students find information to create statistics such
as mean, median, mode and create visual representations such as a
box-and-whisker plot for their posters. The student with the role of
predictions could figure out their theoretical probabilities and then
throughout the tournament find their experimental probability. The
geography could be included within each task by having each student
create some form of map to relate to the information.
Overall,
I think the creator of this website wanted to incorporate the theme and
loosely connected standards. The project has a lot of potential, but
needs a stronger emphasis on technology or core standards.
