Going on a froggie webquest

Ever run a webquest in your class?

I created a really short one as a bonus with a set of my free Buzz Brains cards. The webquest topic became relevant to the activity because I put frogs on the back of all the activity task cards. I’m all about mixing nature up with mainstream curriculum so why not include frogs in maths!

There are a number of ideas for including the webquest in your classroom in the activity description for the Buzz Brains cards, but here's another way to use it.

Unless students are explicitly taught how to search for information on the internet, they end up overloaded with FACTS, much of which needs to be filtered to get to what they really need. I’ve used simple webquests like this to teach about internet searching.

If a student plugged the three clues on the webquest into a search engine, they would find the answer, but to explicitly teach, I have demonstrated as a whole class about how to narrow down information.

First, let’s search for frogs (the first clue) .. about 150,000,000 hits. Far too many!

Next, let’s refine it a bit and only search for frogs in Australia (the second clue) … about 18,600,000. Still too many to sift through!

Let’s now include the third clue caerulea and … only about 58,400 results, but bingo … a quick scroll down will show that all hits are about Green Tree Frogs, the answer.

Happy webquesting.