Reflection on Webquest

What is it, and what is it about?
I worked on my webquest with Whitney Paulsen, Erin Randolph and Lindsey Boskovich. We had a hard time at first deciding what to do our webquest on. In all of our classes we have been talking a lot about social studies context and we wanted to branch out and try something else. We decided as a group to do our webquest on nutrition and the benefits of being/staying healthy. We had the students fill out a log of their current eating habits, then after teaching them about the food pyramid they had to plan healthy meals for one day. Our final assessment was going out into the real world and seeing if they could create a healthy menu at a fast food restaurant. We had them go to the Wendy's fast food restaurant web page and create a healthy meal. We had a lot of different activities to assess their knowledge.

How did it go, what was easy/difficult?
Overall I felt that our group worked well together. We had a lot of ideas that we wanted to share with each other so that gave our webquest a variety of activities and insights. I would have to say, working in a group for this project provided some difficulties. The biggest problem that was presented was that only one person could work on the computer at a time. I think that our group came to the consistence that we all felt like we were sitting around while one other person was doing all of the work. I think that our webquest turned out well in then end, it was just difficult getting all of our group together to finish and complete our tasks.
One of the easiest things about our webquest was there was tons of information that we found on the internet. We had so many resources to pull our information from. We found a variety of webquests that guided us to our final project. I am was glad that there was a wealth of knowledge that we could use in this webquest to better ours.

Why is this webquest important?
Technology is becoming more important and used more frequently each and every day. Webquests allow the students to go out on the internet and research topics that they are learning in their classrooms. This is a great way to break up the "regular" instruction in the classroom.

Now what...Am I going to use this webquest in the future?
I am not sure I would use this exact same webquest in my classroom in the future. I want to teach and this webquest might be to advanced for my students. I do plan to use other webquests in my classroom though. Something that I would do that would be different is gear it towards my certain age group of students. I think technology is great for the classroom!

Why?...Why webquests?
Like I said in a earlier section, technology is vastly growing in America. I feel like soon everything will be done through technology in the classroom. Webquests are a great way to guide the students knowledge in the direction that you would like them to go.

Has this taught me anything about my skills of technology?
I think every time I do something with powerpoint I learn a new skill that I had not known before. I don't think that your learning ever stops. I feel like my skills are improving each and everyday. I had to learn how to do a powerpoint on a Mac, so that taught me a lot of how to use my own computer. I learned new and exciting things that I can do on my Mac that I don't think PC have.

2 things I need to improve on.
I really want to learn how to put your powerpoint up on the web, so I can do this in my future classroom. I also want to get better at using Microsoft Publisher. I think that it has more features to offer than powerpoint, and I want to become more familar with that program.