Week 6: Getting Started - WebQuest Pt2

On Tuesday I published my WebQuest and wanted to be able to update it, if necessary, so that I could have it ready in my class on Thursday.

I must admit that I really worked hard, even at night, just to finish it on time. I feared that if I'd lost just one day, I wouldn't have been able to include it in my final project. Fortunately, the things went according to the plan. 

On Thursday afternoon, I told my students about the project they would be doing. They asked me if it had to do anything with Edmodo, since some senior students had told them about this new ‘cool way they are using the internet for English classes’.  Even this sounded like a positive thing, right from the beginning. It meant that they are probably interested. I used almost half of my class time to explain to them how to first sign up for Edmodo, make a student profile, and how we’d be communicating through it. I told them that I already posted a link with a special kind of a project only for them. I showed them the Welcome page and explained that in this project I'd  be just an observer, and that they would do everything with the little help of the Internet.  Our next class was the day after, and I was quite curious to hear their initial response. 
 

By Friday afternoon, 23 out of 29 students created an account in Edmodo, and checked the WebQuest page. The students created 6 groups of 4 and one of 5 students in the class the same day. They also chose which sections of the newspapers they would like to work on. I gave them maximum two weeks for the project, and I am having doubts whether this would be too much time. Working together to create one section of the newspaper, students will do a lot of peer-editing/peer-correction, which will also improve their critical thinking skills but will certainly  require quite some time to be done. Another thing I had to take into account is that they come home late (after 7 or 8 pm) and that they have total of 13 different subjects/classes to prepare and study for every week.  We’ll see if it will work out this way.

A new week is ahead of us.