Monday, May 22, 2006

Internet Hunts

Did everybody except for me already know about this great resource? And if you knew already, why didn't you tell me?

5 comments:

Ruth said...

So you would just go page by page? There weren't any search engines? Tell us more, Grandpa! :-)

The main issue, as it was pre-internet, is teaching kids to evaluate sources. They think if they've cut and pasted something off the internet, it must be right and true. And one webpage is just as valid as another.

Bridget said...

Is an internet hunt the same thing as a webquest?

Ruth said...

Probably?

Anonymous said...

Yes, from what I can tell these Internet hunts are very much like the lesson plans that involve Internet links, like WebQuest does.

For more information about WebQuest, go to: http://webquest.sdsu.edu/

Ruth said...

Thanks for the link, Matsu.

You'll think I'm incredibly low-tech, but last week when I did the Internet Hunt with my seventh graders, it was the first time I'd done anything like that with a class. I think it's a great pre-research kind of activity. I could see how some of my kids had trouble getting the answer to a question out of a webpage. But what really surprised me was that some of them didn't know how to navigate around the web at all. Most of my kids love to chat on the internet but for many of them it seems that's the extent of it. The Hunt has links; some didn't know that you were supposed to click on them to get the answers. They had to read two reviews of the novel on Amazon; some didn't know how to search for the reviews on Amazon's homepage. I knew that answering the questions would be challenging to some, but I thought the internet part would be easy for them.