"The Usage of Webquest in Education"

THE USAGE OF WEBQUEST IN EDUCATION
Today we will mention the extent of the Webquest’s efficiency as a teaching and learning tool. As you know in our lives technology has a very large part in order to provide us convenience. So that we can take some advantages of using it in the field of education. It facilitates knowledge attainment and supporting a problem-based learning, group work as well as interaction of the students. They can develop their criticial thinking skill and their creativity. Webquest increase students’ motivation. The focus should be made on the contents of the resources and assignments to make them more encouraging. There are compelling reasons for using Webquest in the classroom. First of all, they are an essay way for teachers to begin to incorporate the Internet into the classroom, on both a short-term and long-term basis – no specialist technical knowledge is needed either to produce or use them. More often than not, they are group activities and as a result tend to lend themselves to communication and the sharing of knowledge - two principal goals of language teaching itself. Additionally, they can be used simply as a linguistic tool, but can also be interdisciplinary, allowing for crossover into other departments and subject areas. They encourage critical thinking skills, including: comparing, classifying, inducing, deducing, analysing errors, constructing support, abstraction, analysing perspectives, etc. It enables us to teach students how to be independent thinkers since most of the problems encountered in a Webquest are real-world problems. To sum up, as we refered above Webquest is a technology-based tool which can help to increase competency in the use of technology and by doing so we can raise awareness of students while they are on task. The successful implementation of the Webquest in teaching and learning practices is that offering different materials especially technological materials takes students attention very well. The input that they get will be long-termed and internalised.

MERVE SÖNMEZ / MİRAY ÖZCAN