I'm designing a webquest for seniors. They'll be writing a kind of creative life story, using the net as a resource to connect historical events to their personal stories.

1 History websites with multimedia as a transformation scaffold in the middle of the process--

2 I'll put production scaffolds--a tutorial for Word, and an outline/writing guide towards the end of the process.

Travel Diary through the California Missions

Reception Scaffolding:

Provide a map of the locations of the missions in California
Picture of what a travel diary looks like
Show examples of old travel diaries
Review standard map reading skills


Transformation Scaffolding:

How to take notes?
How to glean important information from a large amount of text
Pick the 5 missions they will be interested in studying
How to write a rough draft

Production Scaffolding:

What is the writing format of a travel diary?
What does a final draft mean or what should it look like?
Provide blank California map in the travel diary that they will need to plot their five missions.

Reception: Provide students with websites and guide students on extracting relevant information.

Transformation: Give studetns a chart or guide to organize the information they find. Students can list the "pros and cons" of each side of the issue.

Production: Students will be provided a guide for writing a persusive letter.

Our WebQuest is about diabetes in the Native North American population. Students are researching the topic and producing a persuasive argument that could be used to address their tribe and/or family members.
In the area of reception scaffolding we expect to possibly use the student guides for brainstorming, building consensus and evaluating web page content.
In the area of production we expect to possibly use the student guides for interview techniques and persuasive arguments.
As we produce this webquest we may find we use less than these five, but looking at them now, they apply!

Our topic is on U.S. Immigration in the 1800's.

A transformation scaffold that we will provide will be to model the note taking process so students will be able to extract and summarize the information from websites.

A production scaffold will include students writing a personal one day diary entry. This will help them experience the process of writing a diary entry.

Another production scaffold will be to create a mock discussion of Immigration Meeting of the Minds.

Problem: Students may have a hard time evaluating the artwork.

Scaffolding (Reception): Guides on how to approach a piece of artwork, specifically questions they should ask themselves in order to better understand what they are looking at.

Scaffolding (Reception): Context/Background information

Problem: Students can identify a social problem, but will have a hard time making connections or finding relevance to their own lives.

Scaffolding (Transformation): Offer several types of examples in different mediums which will help students think of the social issue differently.

Problem: Students will not know what social problem to look at and make it worth their expression and thier concern.

Scaffolding (Production): Teacher offers to the students a list of social issues and a brief overview of them. Specifically, teacher may provide a Hotlist of relevant sites for the students to choose from.

Our webquest is about the book "Holes"
The taks is for the student to add another chapter at the end of the book. First, as a whole group activity we could read together a popular short story and model how to create a new chapter, so that students have a sample to follow when working on their own project. We need to make sure students have knowledge on how to format a chapter. Guide them on how to organize their ideas, so that the added chapter makes sense.

Edited by author 04-21-2003 11:04 PM
WQ topic: students write a constitution for a non-democratic nation (Congo, Burma, China, Saudi Arabia, or Oman)

potential problem #1
students read documents (demographics, news article, dissident websites, ect.)
reception scaffold: reading guide with issue for which to look, glossary of political terms (military dictatorship, Chinese Communism, Marxism, dissident, etc.)

potential problem #2
students may not know how to write a constitution
production scaffold: template of possible constitutiion (based on US model since students will be familiar with that one), list of "essential" items (bill of rights, voting regulations, taxation, women's rights, building the military/draft, etc.)

Webquest- Endangered Species of the Rainforest. Bi-continental virtual trek.

Production
Journal entries- Scaffolding provided for production- give and example of a journal entry. i.e. observations, sketches, etc.

Receptive/Production
Daily research- what to look for in animal behavior. Provide ideas, helpful on important behaviors to document.

Receptive
Provide a glossary of terms they might encounter on the websites.

Think about tonight's lecture and identify those places in your WebQuest that would benefit by the inclusion of scaffolding. For each place, describe what kind of scaffolding (reception, transformation, production) it is and how you will provide it.

This is a draft. When we meet I'll help you figure out how to accomplish it.