Week 2-WebQuest

WebQuests are interesting internet tools that can be used in the classroom. According to Bernie Dodge, A WebQuest is an “inquiry-oriented lesson format” that uses the web as the format student led investigations. WebQuest.org is a website with a plethora of information on WebQuests. It has the standard definition of a WebQuest, plenty of WebQuest examples, design templates, and a number of other useful resources. One particularly interesting resource that I found on the site is a community message board where people can post information, questions, and even chat with one another about different WebQuest technologies.

I think that WebQuests are very useful. They kind of remind me of a learning center. Only older learning centers were typically designed with cardboard and paper. I think that we will see a change in WebQuest development over the course of the next few years. For example, most current WebQuests are designed with using hyper-text mark-up language. Hyper-text mark-up language or HTML as it is commonly referred is an older coding language that has been used to publish documents on the World-Wide Web since mainly used for documents. However, with the development extensible markup language or XML, websites can be connected to databases and end users can choose multiple formats from which to retrieve and enter data. Finally, I think that there is a lot of excitement about the development of Active Server Pages or ASP, which is a programming language that is derived from VBScript. ASP.Net is a free technology developed my Microsoft that allows programmers to develop dynamic, interactive websites. It will be interesting to see further development of WebQuest’s using some of the more advanced web programming languages.