ICT As MindTool

"Every generation has his ways and his style" this is an old say I used to hear it from my old-age relatives; especially, when they compare their lifestyle with the current. In fact, the same applies for teaching style and methods. In my school, I talked to experienced teachers about what style they prefer in teaching and I found out that they almost prefer the old traditional way of teaching. This cannot fit with the new generations who grown up with computer, internet, mobile, and play station. It's been obvious that such a way of teaching is going to decrease student's desires of learning. Therefore, teachers are encouraged to use Mind-tools like ICT tools to engage student's critical thinking and higher desire of learning.

Technologies have been used traditionally in schools to ‘teach’ students, much the same as teachers ‘teach’ students (tell students what they know and assess their recall and comprehension of what they were told). I do not believe that students learn from computers or teachers—which has been a traditional assumption of most schooling. Rather, students learn from thinking in meaningful ways. Thinking is engaged by activities, which can be fostered by computers or teachers. Thinking is engaged by representing what students know in the forms required by different MindTools.  MindTools, therefore, are computer applications that require students to think in meaningful ways in order to use the application to represent what they know.

A Web Quest

A Web Quest is an inquiry-oriented lesson format in which most or all the information that learners work with comes from the web. Web Quest is also one of the most recent activities that are used in educational work, which employs approved activities on the internet in the classroom. So in this paper I will reflect on what I have learned and read about web quest.

In fact, there are many goals for using the Web Quest. Web Quest gives students the functions and specific activities to enable them to use sources of knowledge available to solve the problems raised in addition to learning life skills such as discovery, reasoning and inference and generalization, so the responses when dealing with the knowledge is not specified in advance, but there is creativity and learning in an active and sustainable In addition, Web Quest is a modern and fantastic occupancy and activation of the students to explore knowledge in a planned and sequential through educational activities, methods of teaching education depends on information technology and work groups such as the methods of problem solving and active learning, which makes the student the center of the educational activity. Moreover, Web Quest allows students to explore specific issues and achieve self-knowledge, and achieve the building of his own knowledge and creativity of it, so the student can deal with the knowledge in a way that does not depend on the conservation and memorization.

Web Quest should be well suited to all levels of students, and  must also contains educational activities and develops the capacities of their different needs. It should also allows them to deal with the educational content and knowledge, and develops a balanced personality that stands for all the views and possible solutions to the issue of research.

There are six key elements to build a Web Quest:
• Introduction: Presentation on the lesson and the boot to raise students' motivation
• Tasks: The development of questions and activities including progressive elements of the lesson and the division of students.
• Procedure: To clarify the mechanisms and steps to accomplish the tasks
• Sources: Links to Internet sites to be used by students
• Assessment: to measure the skills and products that students will master through various activities
• Recommendations and the results are the summary of the lesson ideas and results of activities.

These are the most important ideas about the Web Quest, I defined the web quest, its goals, and its components. And I will try my best to apply this in my lessons.

Web Quest templates, Click here....