Virtual tours through Webquests

Whenever your students seem interested in knowing anything about a specific place, they will be giving you the chance of either organising a virtual trip for them or helping them to organise it by themselves. It will basically depend on their age and their command of ICTs.

If you are the one to organise it, I recommend you to do it through a Webquest.

For those of you who are not familiar with this tool, go to Wikispaces.com and start exploring. You will find a fantastic way of engaging your students.

Creating a Webquest can take quite a lot of your free time, but be sure it will worth it: you will be promoting collaborative work and autonomous learning while your students get involved and have fun exploring.

Webquests are mainly suitable for older kids, since they usually require certain skills younger students still lack, but you can create friendly webquests about different topics for younger users, so that they can also start exploring by themselves.

Through a Webquest virtual tour you can provide your students with several links, previously selected and checked by you, for them to directly access certain sites related to the place they want to know about. This way they will be able to watch some interesting videos and images and they will gain access to some useful articles which will guide them through their research while improving their listening and reading skills. Then, they may be asked to comment on them (while improving their writing skills), select some relevant information, etc.

If you want to see how an already made Webquest looks like, you can have a look at this one, although it was created by me with a different teaching purpose: Digiriendo.

We have to bear in mind that we, teachers, are not required to be information providers anymore, but self-learning facilitators. Take advantage of Webquests and you will be helping your students to learn by themselves.