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Many teachers ponder how they can better take advantage of the learning opportunities offered by the World Wide Web. Their classrooms connected, their students astute Internet surfers, their community expecting great things, they are looking for ways to get online and augment what they are already doing in the classroom. One good idea comes from the pioneer teachers who have developed what I call web assignments, and what others call webquests. This week's article suggests ways for building a simple web assignment, as a way to bring some Web life to the classroom, and prepares you to develop a more complex webquest later on.

What is a Web Assignment?

It's one that sends students out on the Internet to gather information and answer questions pertinent to the subject under study. You can find some good examples of these kinds of assignments at http://webquest.sdsu.edu. You might also try a little Web assignment yourself -- I've posted one for you at http://lengel.net/AssignmentAmerica.doc This topic may not be in your curriculum, but going through this assignment will help you understand how a Web assignment works.

A good Web assignment focuses students on ideas that are important to the curriculum. It uses Web resources that cannot be found in typical school libraries. It puts the student into the role of information-finder, investigator, and seeker of answers to worthwhile questions. It asks questions that take students in different directions, and that exercise a wide range of intellectual activities. It requires students to face the facts, analyze the differences, draw conclusions, and explain the answers. It is designed so that there may be more than one answer to some of the questions, and so that students may end up in different places. Most of all, it is designed to produce new learning.

Now that you have experienced some Web assignments, it's time to create one of your own. Begin by making a Hotlist for a topic from your curriculum. Then develop the Assignment, as a series of questions that can be answered from the sites in the Hotlist. Then post or distribute the Assignment to your students, and help them work through it.

Make a Hotlist

A hotlist is simply a list of Web resources relevant to a subject in the curriculum. You develop a hotlist by searching the Web for sites that might help your students learn about the topic at hand, at a level appropriate to them. The easiest way to construct a hotlist is to embed the links to the sites you find in a Microsoft Word document. If you embed Web links in a standard Word document, your students will be able to follow those links when they open your document on their computers. This is a very good way to distribute assignments and readings that contain references to online documents and web sites. These documents can be distributed through a Web site, attached to an email, or saved to a disc.

An example might look like this:

The America's Cup (http://www.americascup.com) is a trophy granted to the winner of an international sailboat race. You can learn about the history of this cup at the Herreshoff Marine Museum (http://www.herreshoff.org)

This example contains two types of links. The first implicit link, on America's Cup, hides the URL, while the second shows it explicitly. These instructions show you how to create both kinds.

The Steps:

1. Open a new Word document. Write your introduction.
2. When you get to the place where you want a link to be, stop for a moment. Save your document.
3. Open your web browser (Internet Explorer, Netscape).
4. Connect to the web page you want to link to.
5. Select the URL of the site in the browser's address bar.
6. Choose Copy from the File menu. This copies the URL to your computer's memory.
7. Go back to your Word document.

If you are creating an implicit link:

1. In Word, select the text you want to link from.
2. Choose Hyperlink from the Insert menu.
3. Paste the URL into the box at the top.
4. Click OK, and watch the selected words turn blue.

If you are creating an explicit link:

1. Paste the URL into the text of the Word document.
2. Press return on the keyboard.
3. Watch the URL turn blue.

When your document is complete, save it. Then test it by clicking the links to make sure they work. You may upload this document to a Web site; you may attach it to an email; you may distribute it on floppy disk or CD-ROM; you may post it to a web server. No matter how you distribute it, when your students open it, they will be able to follow your links.

From Hotlist to Assignment

A hotlist can be a valuable resource for learning, but in and of itself it is not an assignment, and will not guarantee learning. What you need to add to the hotlist are the questions that turn it into a Web Assignment.

The key to a successful web-based assignment is the set of questions that you pose. A hotlist, treasure hunt, sampler, or scrapbook will by itself seldom lead to learning all by itself - the student needs a question or provocation from the teacher, for which the hotlist can serve as a resource.

For your first web assignment, it's a good idea to pose a series of different types of questions, beginning with factual questions, then posing some analytical questions, then an evaluative question, and finally a question that you don't know the answer to. The purpose of these questions should be to get students to peruse, confront, and think about the content that's referred to in your hotlist.

Facts

For example, consider the hotlist about the America's Cup that you saw earlier. It included a series of Web sites about the history of this boat race as well as references to the current competitions. A factual question for this assignment might be:

Where is the America's Cup race taking place this year?

This question can be answered easily by visiting almost any of the sites. Another factual question might be:

What countries are competing in this year's race?

By finding the answers to these questions, the students will be exposed to the content of the sites, and will peruse other aspects of the topic at hand. Most of them will succeed at this task, perhaps strengthening their confidence to tackle the next part of the assignment.

Analysis

The next question might be analytical, asking them to compare things that they find, or draw conclusions from information found on several different sites. Analytical questions might include:

Compare the experience of the crew of 'Prada' with that of 'Stars and Stripes.'

Describe the differences in performance between the British and American teams over the last month of racing.

These kinds of questions require the students first to search the Web for the relevant facts, and then to put these facts together, and finally to draw a conclusion from them. The search and the analysis will in most cases cause them to learn more about the topic at hand. It's important that the answers to the analytical questions not be found directly on the sites themselves, but require searching several sites and conducting a new analysis.

Evaluation

Moving up the intellectual ladder, we might pose some evaluative questions that require facts, analysis, and a prediction or judgment. An evaluative question for this assignment might be:

Based on crew experience and performance so far in the races, who do you predict to win the cup this year? Why?

or

Explain how the technical aspects of the boats, the weather, and crew experience interact to produce a winner. Which of these three factors is most important? Why?

Answering this question requires the gathering of facts and opinions from the sites, a bit of comparative analysis, and a judgment. It also calls for the student to explain how she arrived at her conclusion. Again, it's important that this question is not one that has already been treated on any of the sites in your hotlist.

A final question might explore an issue on which there is no commonly-accepted answer, and which you have not fully explored yourself. Such a question might be:

From race performance so far, can you ascertain any relationship between boat speed and the use of exotic materials in construction?

A speculative question like this put the student in a different role vis a vis his teacher, and often engenders more interesting class discussions.

Construct the Assignment

The best way to build the Web assignment is to add to the hotlist you created in Word the questions that you developed in these categories. Format the document to appear like the America's Cup assignment you saw earlier. Distribute the document to students by email, posting to a Web site, copying to all the computers in the classroom, or posting to a network server, or putting it on a floppy disk. Don't forget to tell them when the assignment is due.

Try It Yourself

Build a Web Assignment for a topic you'll be teaching next week. First make a hotlist and then add your questions. Remember that the questions you pose will make or break the web-based assignment. Take the time you need to construct these questions to fit the needs of your curriculum and the nature of the content on the Web.