Introduction
During this webquest you are going to learn more about your classmates’ home town/city or their favourite place, and then decide which one of them will win The Perfect Place to Live competition.
Task
With the help of the Internet you are each going to design a fun activity such as a treasure hunt, quiz or questionnaire to introduce your classmates to your home town or city (or alternatively to your favourite place). Your chosen place may eventually win the Perfect Place to Live competition.
Your classmates will have to use the Internet to complete your activity. Then as a class you are going to set up The Perfect Place to Live competition.
As the judges for the competition you will have to brainstorm the criteria you would use to evaluate the perfect place to live. You will then match your own places to the criteria
and the places that most closely meet the criteria will be entered into the competition. In groups you will put together a presentation to support your claim that this is the perfect place to live. Based on the presentations everyone will then vote in an on-line poll to
decide the winner of The Perfect Place to Live competition.
Process
To complete this webquest please work through the following activities in the order they
appear below.
Activity1.
Where is your teacher’s favourite place? Complete their treasure hunt using the suggested websites to find the answers.. When you have finished compare answers with your neighbour to see if you are correct. Have fun!
Activity 2.
Now chose a place. It could be your home town or city, or perhaps your favourite place (for example this could be a city you have visited on holiday, or a town where some of
your relatives live). Think about what you would like to tell the rest of the class about your chosen place and make some notes.
Is there something unusual or strange about it?
Is it famous for something?
Does someone famous come from your town?Does it have a special landmark?
Using your notes you are now going to put together a treasure hunt like your teacher’s or it could be a questionnaire or a quiz to let the others find out about this place of yours.
Using the Internet to find out more about your chosen place or to check your information put together 10 items for your classmates. Remember to bookmark the sites where you find your information. These should then be added to direct your friends to where they
should look for the answers.
To get you started, try searching for your town or city on one of these websites:
www.google.com
www.yahoo.com
http://encarta.msn.com
http://en.wikipedia.org
www.ask.com
These two sites could also be useful: www.iexplore.com, www.tripadvisor.com
Activity 3.
For this next section your teacher will divide you into groups and give you the treasure hunts from a different group to complete. The treasure hunts need to be completed and checked and then read by all of you and still leave some time to discuss the cities you
have found out about. Your discussion should use phrases like this:
This is interesting. Did you know that …….
I had no idea that …
It’s not like my town because …
It’s just like my city, we also …
It’s better than my place because….
It’s worse than my town, we have/don’t have …
Activity 4.
You are going to be judges for The Perfect Place to Live competition. With the whole class you are going to think about what makes somewhere the perfect place to live.
Would it be its location? Its size? The amount of sports facilities or shops or schools?
Your brainstorming session should result in a list of criteria against which you would judge the towns entered into the competition. Visiting the sites below may help you with
some ideas:
Mercer Human Resource Consulting
http://www.mercerhr.co.uk/pressrelease/details.jhtml?idContent=1173105
Economist Intelligence
http://www.eiu.com/
UN Human Development Index
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0778562.html
These sites are used by organizations to determine which countries are better places to live. Have a look at which criteria they use.
Evaluation
After the winner has been announced you should write a self evaluation of about 250 – 300 words in English about your participation in this webquest.
In your evaluation try to answer these questions:
How did you find group working? How effective was your contribution to the group?
What did you learn about using the Internet? What did you learn about making
presentations? How did your English improve during the course of this webquest?