WebQuest

My adapted WebQuest


The usefulness of WebQuests:

• Teachers can set up a "guided lesson" that students can complete more independently and at their own pace.
• Teachers can create WebQuests as a starting point or a supplement to a larger study in class, so that students have a jumping off point for internet research.

Discoveries:

• The original tool to make WebQuests is a little finnicky and outdated, it is much easier to use tools such as Google Sites, or WordPress to create one.

How in can be used in my profession:

• It has some great uses in the classroom as I discussed above, in my particular age-group (3-5 year olds) it may be a little text heavy to be useful as independent work.
• It can be used as a place to collect videos and links to games, as a collection of resources on a particular lesson, however I think there are better ways to do this than using a WebQuest.

Prezi

My Prezi on A Plant's Life Cycle

Prezi’s purpose and usefulness in the classroom

1. Prezi lets you make dynamic presentations that are available in the cloud.
2. The purpose of Prezi is to help users make presentations that differ than the "traditional" linear slide presentations in the style of Power Point.
3. Prezi is also used because the storage system that they use places all your Prezi presentations in the cloud, and can be accessed anywhere you have an internet connection.
4. It is useful in the classroom to both teachers and students, in that both can use Prezi to create multimedia presentations on any subject they are learning. The presentations can be shared easily to be viewed individually, or by the entire group.
5. Prezi's use of a plane to work with, instead of a linear order of slides also adds to it's usefulness to presenting certain information. The presentation I created on a lifecycle, when viewed from a wider angle shows the slides placed in a circular orientation. That orientation is not possible in a program like PP.

Advantages

1. The presentations produced are different that a normal PP presentation, they move differently, have a variety of different views, and may be more engaging initially to people who have not seen them before
2. Presentations are stored online, and can be accessed where ever you have an internet connection.
3. The interface is clean and easy to learn.
4. It is mostly free

Disadvantages

1. Prezi is bandwith heavy, some with slower connections may have a harder time loading it in a reasonable amount of time.
2. Some features are behind a paywall.
3. Some features are buggy, it took a couple tries adding images to the presentation without getting an error.