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“To Kill a Mockingbird Webquest” is an English webquest for high school students. It was published by Orchard Park High School in New York.
In this project, the students’ task is to explain to Scout Finch, one of the book’s main characters, what America is like today. Scout has traveled forward in time to modern America, and she’s justifiably confused about how things are so extremely different from the 1930’s. The students need to help bring her up to speed.
More of an Idea Than a Finished Webquest
My goal today was to find a To Kill a Mockingbird webquest to share. It’s a popular topic, and I only have one listed on the site so far. Today’s addition isn’t really a complete webquest (although it’s labeled as such by the authors), but I like the idea. Plus, I need a webquest to use as an example for how to build a webquest in WordPress, and I think I’ll be expanding this idea into a more complete webquest for that purpose. I’ll add a link to the finished product later.
In the meantime, more on what the people at Orchard Park actually published. The premise is pretty cool. Scout Finch, the main character of Harper Lee’s novel, has traveled forward in time to modern America. She’s in your town, at your school… and she needs to know what the heck is going on in America. She’s a kid like you – so explain to her how things have changed!
This premise leads to a fairly standard research approach, where students have to learn about various aspects of Depression Era America and then compare then to modern America. There is a short resource list to help the students, and this is one of the first problems. Many of the resources listed as simply huge websites – PBS, C Span, En Carta, Ed.gov. There may be information on these websites, but there is surely a lot of irrelevant information. Being that vague really defeats the purpose of providing students with resources for completing a webquest.
Also, there’s no clear definition of the task or the evaluation. The idea is presented well as an introduction, and there are materials to help scaffold the students’ research process. However, it’s very unclear what the final product is (a letter, a presentation, a mock dialogue, etc) and how the students will be evaluated.
What Do You Think of This To Kill a Mockingbird Webquest?
Check out the original here, and then come back and leave a comment. Clearly it’s not complete or perfect, so how would you finish it to make it better than other To Kill a Mockingbird webquests?
The post To Kill a Mockingbird Webquest: Explaining Modern America to Scout appeared first on Rockin' Webquests.
