Imagine you’re a middle school social studies teacher and your assignment is U.S. history. You have a small group of students who are quite capable of learning more than the standard fare. Unfortunately, you don’t have time to design and lead them through a separate curriculum. An alternative would be to compact their curriculum and present them with a WebQuest, such as The Effects of the Cotton Gin on Life in the United States: Different Perspectives.
As teachers, we need a bag of “educational tools” from which to draw. No one teaching method should be used when working with students: instead, we need a repertoire of techniques from which we can pick and choose according to the individual and circumstance. The use of WebQuests is one such tool that can be used for differentiation in the classroom either with a small group or for a student to use as an independent study. WebQuests contain a list of teacher-screened Web sites that can be used to do research and complete specific tasks within a defined structure. When using these with gifted students, the tasks should be more complex than with the regular population. WebQuests are most often used with children in upper elementary and middle schools.
There are three different ways that teachers can apply WebQuests:
1. Use a WebQuest that has already been created and is available on the Internet.
2. Take a WebQuest that has been created and modify it to meet the needs of your students.
3. Create your own WebQuest.
For sources of WebQuests that are already created, take a look at
For sources to modify existing WebQuests, see
For help in creating your own WebQuests, check out
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