Teacher Instructions
Our webquest philosophy is mostly based around student driven learning. We believe in student initiated exploration and self-discipline during the completion of our webquest. Teachers, your job for the duration of the assignment is to work as a mentor for students. Ideally, we think the teacher’s role is to monitor conversation, help ideas flourish, and provide reminders about where students should be in the process.
We encourage our teachers to follow and create along with their students to help create an equal classroom environment, with all its members focusing on the same activity prompts each day.
Suggested classroom procedure: (Text copy available in word doc to the right of this paragraph)
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On the first day of the webquest, please have students follow along on their own computers as you navigate the website on the projector or smart board. Ask the students about their experiences with webquests and go over your decisions in choosing a webquest unit. Allow the students to explore the webquest page. Please point out to students that the material is not intended to be rushed and that time management is an important aspect of their success in the project. Each Mission tab holds around three steps, and each step relates roughly to one day’s work.
Before day three, please use your classroom website to create six new conversation prompts for students to respond to, labelled:
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Research Reflections
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Character Backstories
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Comics Reflections
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Hero and Villain Reflections
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3D Design Reflections
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Webquest Reflections
Students will be responding to these prompts throughout their webquest journey. Responses should be a minimum of 5 sentences.
2. On day two, we ask teachers to begin the class with a short overview of the website “Lino”. Please have your own Lino board prepared on Linoit.com and show students how to use the actions menu in the upper right of your board. Please take some time to explore the options on the website. Show students how to create an Inspiration folder file on their desktop, how to save images to that folder, and then how to post those images to Lino by clicking on the photo icon in the upper right of the Lino board and browsing for the image. After a quick overview of the Lino board, please allow students to begin their step two work.
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqvJ0UHFaug
On day three, have students sit where they can all see your smartboard or projector.Step three focuses on researching characters, character design, comic book history, and sharing information with classmates.We have provided a link video that we would like all the students to watch regarding the history of comics and comic book characters.Please watch this as a class. After the video is done, give students 15 minutes to review and add to their inspiration Lino boards on their own.After 15 minutes of independent work, please have students pair off to discuss their findings for 5 minutes.After 5 minutes, have students switch partners and discuss again for five more minutes.For the remainder of the class time, allow students to expand the content of their Lino boards using the information gathered from their peers.
4. On days four through eight, have students come into the classroom and go right to work on their step four through eight work. Students will need drawing paper, pencils, black pens, sharpie markers (or some kind of black marker), colored pencils, and markers. Every 10 or 15 minutes, please walk around the classroom to monitor conversation and make sure that students are on task. Even though these are not all group projects, we do still want to encourage conversation and information sharing among students as their work toward their final products. Encourage students to keep their Lino boards open even when they are drawing on paper. Allow students to do supplemental research at any point in the process. Answer student questions using your own knowledge, if you do not know the answer, please work with them to find the answer online, or suggest that they send us an email to clarify.
5. On day nine, have students come in and open the 3D design program. Using the projector or smart board, please help students to explore the basics of the application and use the class time to play around with the program. Be sure students know that creations made during this day will NOT be considered final products and will NOT be printed.
6. Give students all of day ten and eleven to work on their 3D design and respond to the 3D design prompt
7. On day twelve, begin printing and ask students to take time to respond to the webquest reflection.
If you have any questions, please feel free to email us:
Kaylie Maines- kem5775@psu.edu
Emily Keim- ekk5079@psu.edu
Below are text copies of the instructions students are given on this website, text copies of the response promts as they appear to the students, as well as a document containing our suggested rubric for evaluation.