Maureen Brown Yoder’s WebQuest Session
She started out with a quiz of the audience. Who spoke in this room yesterday at 2PM? (me). Who’s speaking tomorrow at 10:30 (Tom March, who’s sitting next to me). This was a friendly crowd. I had that familiar feeling of watching my own eulogy incognito, like Tom Sawyer (or was it Huck Finn?)
She’s doing nice job of tying WebQuests back to its historical roots: Socrates, John Dewey, and Jerome Bruner. From the WNET site she called up a bit of audio from Arthur Costa (which is a good idea I should emulate).
She’s comparing the way we learned about things like the Civil War in the bad old pre-constructivist days. In contrast, she showed a couple of Vietmam WebQuests.
For future directions, she gave Philip’s WIP site a plug as well as yesterday’s 3DWQ presentation.
She wrapped up with an exercise in which people came up with tasks that require higher level thinking. (And gave away prizes for good answers.)
Good session overall. About 300 here.
Onadime takes music or other sounds as inputs and turns them into colorful animations. Where was this in the 60s when I needed it? Seems cool but pricey at $199.
Kar2ouche is like Storybook Weaver brought up to date. It lets you restage a play anyway you like (it comes with load of Shakespeare) or create and enact a storyboard from scratch. Some examples: Romeo & Juliet, King Tut as interpreted by an 8 year old. Very cool.
Vantage Learning showed their automated essay scoring system. Looked like just the thing for Julian Charter School to look into.
Think.com is owned by Oracle and provides free web space, student e-mail, templates and community for schools. Could be a good home for WebQuests, as long as the teacher’s school is a member. They don’t let you participate as an individual. I’ve been playing phone tag with someone from this since April. Time to chat with her and see if there’s some kind of partnership that makes sense.
Right now they’re showing a preview of version 3.0 which has some interface tweaks. One cool thing: kids can create an icon to represent themselve using a kind of Mr. Potatohead model. That allows them to personalize it without putting photos up. This, too, is something that we might want to look at for Julian Charter School.