Welcome to Road Trippin'

Greetings and welcome to your after school WebQuest, Road Trippin'. What is a WebQuest, you ask? A Webquest is an inquiry-based lesson, using Web 2.0 tools and the creative minds of you, the students.  With this lesson, you will be able to jump on board and help to direct the learning to a style that fits your interested, within the perimeter of the rubric.

I am very excited to share with you a fun-filled lesson.  In this class, we will explore several diverse places as we take a virtual road trip across the United States.  Each class will begin with a puzzle for solving the mystery of the location.  The puzzle will consist of geographical, historical and cultural glues specific to the location.

Once the mystery has been solved, the students will be introduced to an activity from their destination.  Activities will range from art projects to sports to dances.  At the end of the activity, students will work together to create a two-sided tri-fold brochure to introduce people to their location. Finally, they will write a quick blog post, 2-3 sentences, describing their experiences one the road trip.

I encourage parents to visit the WebQuest at home and continue the explorations of our class. It would be wonderful to hear about your experiences traveling to each of these places.  Students are also encouraged to post individually about their traveling experiences between classes.

I look forward to traveling with you all!
-Mrs. Moore

Educational Value of Animoto

Make a video of your own at Animoto.

While exploring Animoto for the first time, I realized that I could use this tool to challenge my students to use their critical thinking skills and problem solve.  My video uses clues to our class' next road tripping destination.  The students need to look at the images, read the captions and determine where we are traveling.  This is a fun and challenging twist on regular clue-based lessons and is way more exciting than a powerpoint.  

Educational Value of Wordle

Wordle can be a great and fun addition to a lesson plan.  Teachers can use Wordle to introduce information, as a puzzle during an activity, or allow students to make Wordles to explore topics as we have done for this task.  The flexibility of Wordle for the user to choose the colors, fonts and layouts means they can choose how they want information displayed to their audience.  If one is teaching an American history course they could use red, white and blue so the Wordle shows patriotism or the school colors for team spirits.  

If I were to use a Wordle for my Road Trippin’ class, I would use it as a clue for the group’s next destination.  I could input the clues for the city and state to have the students guess the location instead of writing a narrative clue.  This would make the students have to use critical thinking skills at a higher level. The above Wordle is made up of bright colors to catch the students attention and introduce them to the objectives and nature of the class. 

Mrs. Moore

Greetings!

Welcome to Road Trippin'!  Please grab a map, pack an bag, and don't forget your camera.  Check back soon for the first stop on our cross-American travels.