Lernertagebuch von Friederike

I have thought about a possible topic for my WebQuest earlier but I didn't really come to a conclusion. For me it's quite difficult to decide on something. It should be something that students are really interested in - difficult... I thought about doing something on Harry Potter. But there are always pupils who hate that whole HP-boom so that wouldn't be fair. I thought about working on historic persons or ethnic minorities (e.g. Aborigines), one for each group but that still didn't really attract my attention. So last but not least I decided to change my perspective:

• Who will my WebQuest be for? - For teenagers from grade 10 onwards.  
• What kind of problems are they faced with? - As many of them are likely to leave school soon, it's important for them to consider how they would like to live their future life.

Everybody knows that it's hard to come to an occupational decision in a very young age. That's why more and more people prefer to take a so-called gap year between school and apprenticeship, university or job training. I think that it's really useful for students to inform themselves about possible ways how to deal with their future and a gap year definitely is one interesting alternative. So why not developing a WebQuest on possible ways of spending a gap year?

Child labour
Ein webbasiertes Unterrichtsprojekt zu Kompetenzerwartungen des Kernlehrplans Englisch am Ende der Jahrgangsstufe 8

The new "Kernlehrpläne" focus on certain competences our students are meant to achieve. This didactic perspective is in need of new ways and methods in order to meet the requirements. Uppenkamp's and Ludwig's project is one attempt to do so.

Basically, I think they did a good job. Their project seems to me well-structured and quite elaborated. They thought of many ways to support both pupils and teachers by adding several handouts/papers on techniques as well as thematic aspects (although I wouldn't present "possible topics" to the students right from the start). By this means, the teacher steps in the background and the pupils are actviated and encouraged to a more self-dependent working and learning.

But still, there are some minor aspects which strike me:

• I could imagine to start the project in a different way. A film/picture etc. might be more interesting and motivating as an introduction to a new topic than a text.
  
• I'm not quite sure about the autocorrection via google. Basically, I like the idea of students correcting their own texts without the teacher marking everything. But I don't know whether this is an adequate method to deal with mistakes...
• The project is meant to cover about eight to twelve lessons. That means that each group works a long time on the individual topic. So perhaps it would be a good idea to present the dossiers not in class only but also on a paper board for the whole school or combine all outcomes in a webpage etc. Of course it's important that the whole class gets access to ALL dossiers as they are expected to write a test on "child labour" in general.

Die Landesakademie Baden-Württemberg für Fortbildung und Personalentwicklung an Schulen hat sich ebenfalls mit dem Thema Kinderarbeit und internetgestütztes Lernen beschäftigt und sich in diesem Zusammenhang auf die Methode des WebQuests bezogen. Mehr dazu: Globales Lernen am Beispiel "Kinderarbeit"