3 Easy Steps To Practicing Research Skills with Webquests

Kirsten 0:00

This is the social studies teacher podcast a show for busy elementary teachers looking for fun and engaging ways to easily add social studies into their classroom schedule without feeling overwhelmed or pressed for time. I'm curious to know if you southern teach an educator and mom who is passionate about all things social studies, I love sharing ideas and strategies that are low prep and easy to implement. So let's dive in together.

Hi, everyone, welcome to another episode of the social studies teacher podcast. Hopefully you're having a great morning or whenever you're listening to this, and the weather is cooling off, since it's mid October. But I'm really excited to share with you some steps to practicing research skills with your students by utilizing web quests. So I'm going to kind of go into what a web quest is why it's really helpful. Some steps on how you can conduct your own web quests for pretty much any topic not just in social studies, but any topic you want your students to do some research in. And I'll also share with you how I created my web quests that are specifically tailored for upper elementary and where you can find more information about those web quests are online activities that guide students to research a specific topic. They're helping students think critically solve problems and use the internet of course, as it's called a WebQuest.

WebQuest can give students a plan for their online research. It can help them explore different sources, and it can help them check if the information is trustworthy. You can use web quests in different classes, not just social studies and in different grade levels to make learning more fun and help students become better researchers.

There's five different important parts of a WebQuest. There's where you're introducing the specific task, it's a formal description of what they're going to do in the WebQuest are the goal. Then there's the process, there's the steps the student should take to accomplish the task. There's resources, so any resources students could use. There's evaluation, the way students performances will be evaluated, and the standards utilized and also there's a conclusion so there's maybe five to 10 minutes set aside to discuss and refine Correct. We're going to simplify those steps because that was based on the original WebQuest that was developed. But the main thing to note is that students are researching different resources provided or links and sources provided by the teacher to accomplish a specific tasks. So for example, maybe you have students learning about the 13 colonies, you would be providing them with certain resources and links, where they're going to be searching for something and finding the answers to certain questions to complete a specific goal about maybe learning about the New England colonies and the middle colonies in the southern colonies.

All right, so let's go into those three easy steps because I want to make it as simple as possible. The first step is searching for information. Teach students to search for the information using the keywords given in search engines, explain what search engines are and how they work, show them how to use Google, or how to enter keywords for better results. Tell them to use specific and relevant keywords. They should also try different keywords to improve their searches, you can teach them advanced search tools, like using quotation marks for exact phrases, and it'll show up on the results. Or you can do a minus sign to exclude certain words. So this is something if you are having them find the information without any resources at all, or any guidelines to go off of this is a really great tip and first step as far as practicing their research skills. But if you're already giving them the source, this is still really good, because maybe they can't find the answer on a specific webpage, and you're kind of leaving it up to them to maybe find on their own. This is a great tip and starting point to helping them understand that they can't just try to type in a whole sentence or one word, they need to kind of be a little specific, but also not as specific. Number two is when they are evaluating those sources, students should know how to check if a source they find online is reliable. discuss why it's important to know who wrote the source. They should look at the author's qualifications, expertise and possible biases. Are there about pages is there some type of publication date? Is there something in the footer of that page showing information with links to showing maybe their credentials, they should also be careful about sources with no author or anonymous authors. Teach them to look at the sources publication date. And depending on the topic, new information might be crucial, encourage them to find more than one source with the same information or that supports the same information so that they can know that it's correct, and they can fact check. Also ask them to check the sources quality if it has a good design, clear writing and references, warn them about sources with mistakes, too many ads or no references at all. So this goes in hand if you're not providing them the source. You want to make sure that students are understanding when they're researching something that they need to make sure the website is legitimate. The great thing about you providing resources and links for your students is that you can show them what a quality source I should say quality, valid source is and reliable source could be. So thinking like dumpsters, or Britannica kids, or Nat Geo kids is always a really great one I like to go and find information about because they actually have, you know, credible sources of what you know how they're providing that information. So, it's always important to show them examples of what that could look like so that when they're when they are kind of venturing out and finding another source on their own. They're not just picking a random site. Alright, the third step is to organize and present the research. There's a bunch of different ways you can do this through graphic organizers, posters, maybe they are just writing down their answers to their questions that are maybe guided questions, but after collecting and checking their research, students would need to organize and present it clearly. They could create an outline to structure their information logically have headings and sub headings that will make it easier for them to navigate their work. They could also use visuals like images and charts and also clear and simple laying language to explain their findings. It's also important to teach them about citing sources and giving credit to the original authors to avoid plagiarism and do their work with integrity. One really great resource I've always used even since when I was in school was something called Citation Machine, I would enter in that you can enter in the URL, and if you find the author date, and you enter in as much information as you can, and it will spit out an MLA and mean depending on which which format you have, but you can make it in MLA format or APA format. But probably, you know, if anything, if it is utilized in upper elementary, I would say MLA is the best way to go. But it's always great for you know, when students are finding information, they have some type of paper, or graphic organizer or someplace where they can write down their information. And I always told my students in complete sentences, but I know when you know you're trying to research something, you want to jot down as much information and facts as possible. But then giving them that time to reorganize and put their information neatly, either online or on a document, like a slideshow presentation, or on a piece of paper or poster board.

So something that I do have for sale in my TPT store are a ton of web quests, over 80 or 90, I want to say it's a lot of different WebQuest activities. And they're mostly for social studies. And they can be also utilized, you know, with ELA, as far as research and inquiry, you can always connect that make some integrations there. But there's also some for science and math, as well.

But I wanted to share a little background into how I decided to create these fun little activities. I started using web quests. Several years ago, maybe five or six years ago in my fifth grade class. When I taught ELA and social studies, we did a WebQuest on western expansion. And I gave students a kid friendly link some guided questions and allowed them to work in partners with a laptop and sent them off. When I was walking around while they were completing this web quest activity. Students were super engaged, and they were collaborating with each other. There were some pairs that took turns reading paragraphs on that website page. Other pairs worked together to find all the information I loved the collaborative skills that they all were doing. I also loved how it was easy to assign. And I could tell students enjoyed researching the actual information with the help with the guided questions. It was also easy to gray because there were the same set of questions and you just checking for to make sure everybody has similar answers or you know, acceptable answers. Giving students the ability to explore information on their own, gave my students autonomy in their learning. And it also increased their confidence and finding information from expository text. It's giving them that ability to really practice and refine their research skills. Some great things about the web quests that I sell, and I'll make sure I'll link it in the description is that there's both printable and digital options. With every web quest there's also an extra extension activity. It could be like some timeline activity or video, fax or biography poster. There's also for each WebQuest guided questions for students to answer. Based on that specific topic. There's a topic for Rosh HaShana, there's a topic for Thanksgiving, there's a topic for prime numbers, there's a topic for Mount St. Helens, there's like a ton of topics under the sun, I wanted to vary that so that you can pretty much use these web quests anytime of the year. There's also kid friendly links, they're perfect for grades three through five that students can type in and enter. I always suggest using the digital version to grab that link. So they don't have to copy it word for your word. So you can always add the digital version to your drive. And there will be a little spot on the left hand side with a link and you can copy it and paste it on your screen or create a QR code with it. But yeah, it's really great for students that are just getting their feet wet with research skills. And also it's perfect for if you have a sub and you want you know students to do something engaging and but not be super overly rowdy. And it's not too hard for the substitute teacher to implement with the students. Great for homework. There's so many different ways you can use it. So I'll Link my entire bundle. But I have it broken apart into different topics. I have it broken apart by month. So you can always grab it however you see fit. But I'm just going to just for simplicity purposes, I'll link the entire full year bundle in there. And you can always pick and pull which web quests you like best.

Hopefully this gave you some ideas on how you can implement web quests and refine your students research skills with upper elementary. All right, well, that's the end of this episode. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week and I will talk to you all again soon. As always. Thanks for listening to the social studies teacher podcast. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, hit that subscribe button and leave a review. I would love to hear your thoughts. You can also find me on Instagram at the southern teach. I can't wait for you to join me in the next episode for more teacher tips and strategies.

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