Are Webquests Even Cool Anymore?

By:  JasonItec

I hearken back ten years ago when I was in the home stretch of getting my bachelors degree in education, and I had a technology class as one of my remaining “stragglers.”  I really had no idea what to expect, but I was pretty confident in my ability to handle a class that would be rooted in using technology.  After all, I installed a remote-start system in my truck all by myself just the previous year.  Those were actually cool back then.  Before long, I found myself halfway through another whirlwind semester at the revered Youngstown State University when I was told I needed to create a webquest.  This was 2005.  I had never even heard of a webquest (great work YSU education dept.).  To make things even worse, webquests have to be created on a website, which I had no idea how to make either.  Remember, this was before drag and drop Weebly sites.  I had to make this bad boy on Dreamweaver. Luckily for me I had a great instructor, and a week or so later I had created a pretty great Revolutionary War Webquest (which I never looked at again incidentally).  Regardless of whether I actually used it or not, the lesson itself was easy to navigate, educational, fun, and cutting edge.  Fast forward 2015…not so much.  Webquests are just not cool anymore.  The allure of looking stuff up on the computer is worn out, and students are just not impressed anymore.

I have been blessed to have access to a class set of laptops for the past three school years, so the sky is literally the limit as far as my lesson planning.  I cannot imagine teaching without them anymore. But, when I want to introduce a new unit or topic to the class, sometimes I find myself Googling webquests that the students can use a primer for the lesson.  I have looked at hundreds and hundreds of webquests on almost any topic you can think of in World History, U.S. history, Language Arts,  etc.  The common theme I have found in searching for diamonds in the webquest rough?  They are all basically worksheet packets without the paper.  Most of the webquests that I have seen have a list of questions as the “task” accompanied by a convenient link to find the answers.  Sound familiar?  Very seldom do I find a good a webquest that is actually interactive or even resembles anything to do with a “quest.”  Most of the time they are just busywork questions.  It has become a joke with my students even.  When I assign a webquest, they look at me and do the Austin Powers air-quote “WebQuest.”  The students know it sounds way cooler than it actually is. I do try to be creative and design good lessons, but sometimes, when introducing a new topic you just need kids to look up answers from a list of questions. If that is the case, the World Wide Web is flush with these things called Webquests.