A Note to Educators
This WebQuest was done as a project for Kathy Schrock's course at Bridgewater State College (Massachusetts), "Home Pages for Educators." We were to design a WebQuest for our own schools. Since I was in transition from a N-8 school to a K-12 school with a somewhat different approach to curriculum, I tried to make this somewhat generic and adaptable to the needs of middle and high school students in a variety of settings. In the past, I've worked as part of a team, teaching research skills in a highly articulated, recursive, sequential framework through multiple projects. For example, we've used standardized bibliographic recording forms for all resources, attending to the conventions of punctuation and required information according to the format, and color-coding them to help students distinguish among types of resources. I don't envision this as a stand-alone project, and assumed a fair amount of teacher direction, modeling and coaching to help students develop information literacy skills (as in the "Big Six") and make connections between the historical information and themes and trends in the modern world. There are many more websites with information on ancient Rome, including texts and pages with very scholarly content. I stayed with resources that could be interpreted and managed by middle schoolers, that came (mostly) from academic sources--and that had, in many cases, some engaging features that might help to sustain research motivation. I did not provide a list of books for two reasons: I wasn't sure about the target audience, and therefore the appropriate level of resources; and we've found it useful to have students learn and practice book and periodical location and selection skills within the context of projects--when they have a "need to know" these things. If I were using this with a class I would definitely have some exercise in evaluating a web page, using standard criteria for determining the value of an information source, such as authority, currency (not necessarily an issue with these topics), accuracy, accessibility, ease of use, pertinence, and other appropriate measures.
Return to Introduction
Investigation
Web Resources
Presenting the Results
Ancient Rome Webquest-Note to Educators
Kathy Foulke July 31, 1997
http://topcat.bridgew.edu/~kschrock/ED572/foulke/rmindex.htm