WebQuests: not a state-of-the-art tool, but an effective one when designed carefully!

As also stated in the title of this post, WebQuests have been around for some considerable time and been reinforced thanks to the arrival of Web 2.0 or other innovative environments. In fact, in an age when every single thing could change dramatically at the blink of an eye, WebQuests still could be an effective tool in various fields, especially in language teaching. Progress through hyperlinks have always been a fun exercise for me since you might not guess where to end and since it enhances multi-modality. WebQuests could be a good source for this and they may empower teachers by keeping their students active outside the classroom as well.

Although, depending on the environment you are preparing a WebQuest, it might or might not take a long time, it could be simply done on a word processing program, too. Actually, what is preferred mostly is to publish them on the Web so that they might be accessible to a high number of people at the same time for very long and even forever!

Wikipedia defines WebQuests as an inquiry-oriented lesson format in which most or all the information that learners work with comes from the web, and this is what makes this activity meaningful and effective for language learners.As a matter of fact, I am posting this for two reasons; (1) although it takes a long time to prepare WebQuests, especially when you publish it and especially when you are way too perfectionist!, they are pretty useful learning tools without bearing a question and I wanted to share this opinion and tool with you, (2) I personally experienced creating a WebQuest today (which could be accessed through the link here) and I wanted to share my experience when they are still fresh in my mind. My WebQuest is about ‘travel’ and it has been prepared as part of LRC530 course which I am taking this semester. Thanks to this course, I am also working on other technology and Web tools about which I am going to post as much as I can.Thank you for your time. I appreciate your comments and feedback both on my post and my WebQuest, too.
Link to my WebQuest: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~mpolat/webquest/wqindex.html