I love to teach language learners how to write, from grammar and sentence structure to unity, clarity, and cohesion. As they advance, I ask them to check for rhythm and pacing, delete redundancies, and charge their writing with words that pop from the page into their readers’ imaginations. I show them how to carefully craft their sentences to persuade their audiences. Nothing makes me happier than to see these elements emerge in my students’ papers.
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In September 2015 I posted a TESL Ontario blog about revisiting WebQuests. Since then WebQuest founder Bernie Dodge closed his WebQuest site as well as its sister WebQuest archive resource QuestGarden. As well, Zunal.com has closed. As WebQuests have been such an established and relevant activity for language teachers and learners, digital alternatives must be found or developed to fill this void.
This post offers five alternatives to traditional WebQuest editors. Links to WebQuests created with these tools are also shared. These tools may take more effort to produce WebQuests, but they use contemporary productive technologies and work well on most device types.
WebQuests are inquiry-based learning activities in which students use information from the web to complete tasks or solve teacher defined problems on issues related to module topics. They typically involve students exploring specific resources provided by the teacher, often in a structured format to encourage deeper understanding and critical thinking on a given topic. To summarize, WebQuests support student learning through problem solving or knowledge building activities.
WebQuests promote:
Authors of WebQuests guide their learners to create a final project. This is done in the task section of the WebQuest. These may include:
The most common format promoted by Bernie Dodge has been the HTML IFrames format. This is a three parts webpage.
Many contemporary WebQuests do not follow this format. Some are simple web pages or linear documents while others are slide presentations.
The WebQuest structure is generally consistent.
Here are five ways that you can create WebQuests to provide relevant and engaging. Choose the tool that matches your technical skillset. There are more digital tools out there that you can use to create WebQuests. If you are aware of these, consider contributing a comment below to enrich our teaching and learning community.
Alternate tools for creating WebQuests for student use have been offered with examples. Due to the WebQuests guided assignment format, many digital tools can be used to create WebQuests. You can choose the tool is best for your learners. A good practice is to create your web quest on a word-processed document and then transfer the information to another technology such as H5P.
Want to learn more about creating WebQuests?
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Friday, Feb 21, 2025
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The recent buzzword in second language or foreign language teaching is critical thinking. Studies confirm that promoting critical thinking in the classroom yields long term rewards in terms of helping students to think for themselves, analyze the meaning of language and take ownership for their learning. Moreover, critical thinking enriches the language learning experience and makes it more meaningful.
By Christine Smart-Wiseman
I have spent over a decade developing my research in community-setting adult ESL classes. I have found the path to empowerment for newcomers somewhat difficult. Students face many obstacles, including discrimination, racism, and the increasing challenges of settling into a country where English is not their first language. I have also realized that my own positionality, as well as the positionalities presented in teaching materials, can compromise students’ abilities to relate and succeed. This means that my own ideas, and the ideas presented in ready-made materials, often reflect the status quo—not the typical adult ESL learner. So, what can we do about this in the classroom? There are two key ways educators can critically reflect on their teaching practices. Continue reading
As an ESL teacher with over a decade of progressive teaching experience, no notion in English language pedagogy was as mind–blowing to me as the idea of learner autonomy. The way that learning and learners are seen as autonomous has always resonated highly with me; I always thought if anyone masters independent learning, they can learn almost anything with joy and efficiency. Recently, however, I’ve been thinking differently about this. Not because I am now a skeptic of this approach, but because I have been wondering if all learners want to be independent learners! Based on my recent encounters and experience at work, I now think maybe there are some learners who learn best without being independent. In this blog post, I’d like to share my own experience with this type of learner. Continue reading
I asked TESL Ontario educators to record their thoughts on the question “What are one or two ways that you incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion in your teaching practice?” This post shares their recordings (see link below) and synthesizes their responses, which highlight the importance of infusing criticality in classroom texts, talks, and tasks.
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Due to the immense changes in society and the way people communicate in the past 50 years, communication methods are now multimodal, and people need literacy skills that go beyond books. As Tarc (2013) writes, “In our current multicultural societies, it is hard to identify one’s identity and their understanding and background, in order to avoid possible misunderstandings,” (p. viii) and such considerations need to take place now that global migration is at its highest and daily interactions occur with people from different countries than ourselves. Whether or not people have experienced migration and/or immigration personally, many of the people they interact with on a daily basis are likely to have been born somewhere else; even without this interaction, the accessibility to the internet means that no one is isolated in their own “corner” of the world. Digital and print media tools can be used by educators to help students develop critical literacies skills, so that they can be more participatory and contemplative global citizens.
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The numbers 1-2-3 stand for the formula I devised to teach students to develop and demonstrate Critical Thinking Skills. By following the 1-2-3 formula, I teach students to think about their choice of answers. I came up with this strategy as part of my efforts to teach first year college students to answer reading comprehension questions. Historically, I have found that short-answer questions tend to ask students to answer in one or two sentences, which, I think, limit students’ ability to demonstrate critical thinking skills. One or two sentence responses do not really encourage students to explain how they arrive at the answer. The result is usually an answer that can either be easily found in the text or must mirror what the instructor expects the answer to be. Continue reading
Guest Contributor: Christine Smart-Wiseman
Like many others in the field, I am always looking for new ways to improve my teaching. My research as a PhD student at York University led me to examine teaching from a critical pedagogical approach. The guiding principle of this approach is to construct equitable and democratic classrooms with a goal to positively transform students’ lives (Canagarajah, 2005).
While I was doing my research in an ELL classroom, I uncovered many ways in which ELL environments contradict the goals of critical pedagogical approaches. In many cases, planning and preparing ahead to foster a classroom environment that supports critical learning can overcome these challenges, but at times, there may be a dynamic need to shift classroom spaces towards empowering teaching and learning. I have developed a strategy I call critical pivoting to address this problem and would like to share it with you.
Post by Jennifer Chow
#CdnELTchat was happy to have Anna Bartosik (@ambartosik) share her expertise on Self-Directed Professional Development (SDPD) on June 1. Anna is an English language teacher at George Brown College, instructional designer, and PhD Candidate at OISE. Her research is in self-directed professional development in digital networks. Learn more by reading her blog: https://annabartosik.wordpress.com/.
Before we started our discussion, we had a moment of silence to mourn and remember the #215children in Kamloops. #CdnELTchat is also taking time to reflect and plan a future chat with #teslONchat later this month to talk about what we need to do in order to move forward with the 94 Calls To Action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and work for #Reconciliation.
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