Each year I teach two or three sections of Literacy Strategies for Content Area Teachers, a course for preservice secondary educators. Convincing tomorrow's content area teachers of the importance of their contribution to the development of their own students' literacy skills is an important aspect of the course. Another important aspect is the infusion of technology into the curriculum. For more than a decade, teacher educators and the organizations that accredit them have recognized the importance of preparing teachers to use technology effectively (Duhaney 2001,Willis and Raines 2001). An important course assignment, one that encourages students to think about the place of both traditional and technological literacy in their own future classrooms is the webquest project. The purpose of this article is to track the evolution of this project while presenting my experiences in encouraging the practical use of technology in content area classrooms through modeling its use in the reading methods classroom.

When I first began teaching this course, I was convinced of the importance of the integrated unit of study, but not always pleased with the results. Inevitably, my students would design lessons that were developmentally inappropriate. Because our secondary education program offered them no opportunity to observe and study the content area learning of K-6 students, my students would write lessons about the solar system, for example, assuming that ninth-graders had never heard of the moon. How to deal with these misconceptions concerning the level of expertise students have in the various content areas and the wealth of content area experiences they have enjoyed over the course of their education became an important goal for me.

Three years ago, I learned that our office of student affairs was offering small ($500.00) service learning grants to instructors who infused service learning into their courses. I hoped to secure funding to create a partnership between of teachers from a local elementary school and my university classes. Bridging the physical distance between the school and our campus provided a wonderful opportunity to utilize technology, in this case email, in a very practical way. Thus was born "The Email Connection."
 
 

Beginning in the Spring of 1999, students enrolled in my developmental reading course would, in groups of students comprised of the various content areas represented in the class, design integrated units of study for fourth- and fifth-grade students a local elementary school. In order to ensure that the lessons would be appropriate for the target audience, each of my students was assigned two or three "keypals" at the school. The students and their keypals were to converse, via email and journals, concerning the fourth- and fifth-grade students' various content area assignments. I hoped that my students would benefit from this glimpse into the content area learning process and that the younger students would benefit from the opportunity to "write to learn," a popular goal of many literacy programs. In order to present their lessons to the elementary school students, my students would "volunteer" their time at the elementary school, thus serving the purpose of the grant and gaining experience in real classrooms. Unfortunately, the project was a flop.

Well, not a total flop. The younger kids did write a lot. Unfortunately, they wrote in the flashy university notebooks I had purchased for them and not on their classroom computers. A typical pen and paper note from a fourth- or fifth-grade student went something like this: "I'm sory [sic] I diden't [sic] Email you yet. But I will Whan [sic] my dad has time." One would imagine that a school email project would actually involve using email at school, but such was not the case here. Teachers at the elementary school were reluctant to allow students time to work individually at the computer because most of the students were unable to do so autonomously. Additionally, due to equipment restraints, teachers were not successful in scheduling and/or teaching group lessons in the school's computer lab. Because I had made the journals available, teachers at the elementary school opted for the more traditional dialog journal. Carting four crates full of spiral notebooks back and forth between the elementary school and the university campus was infinitely more difficult than herding a class of kids into the computer lab, but the traditional has a certain appeal in our business, and it appeared that teachers were willing to lug those journals around in order to avoid something so new and so seemingly unwieldy. It became obvious to me: the journals had to go. I planned to simply not buy them the following year.

However, the email connection was not the only difficult thing to manage that first semester. The university students were having a hard time arranging their schedules in order to visit the fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms. They complained, legitimately so, that it would not be fair to give them a lower grade because their and the elementary classroom teachers' schedules were incompatible. I found the solution to this problem at theNational Educational Computing Conference: Webquest!
 
 

Originally developed by Bernie Dodge (1995) and Tom March, Webquest is "an inquiry-oriented activity in which most or all of the information used by learners is drawn from the Web; Webquests are designed to use learners' time well, to focus on using information rather than looking for it, and to support learners' thinking at the levels of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation." In the Fall 1999 semester, I abandoned the integrated unit of study project in favor of a webquest project. Now, groups of students comprised of the various content areas represented in the class would design integrated lessons to be delivered via the World Wide Web in the form of webquests. The email connection would remain as a way to check on the appropriateness of the lesson, but no journals and no juggling of schedules. My students were given the option, however, of sending a representative(s) of their group to facilitate the use of their webquest by the fourth- or fifth-grade class they had written their lesson for. (Teachers were asked at the beginning of the semester to provide a list of topics that their students would be studying during the first half of the school year.) The service learning grant provided each group with a $25.00 budget for supplies to be used when preparing or presenting the project at the elementary school.

I wish I could report that this revised Email Connection went off without a hitch, but that was not the case. To begin, the email communication between my students and the elementary school students was almost non-existent. Even though the journals were not an option, teachers were still unsuccessful in planning and implementing lessons in the computer lab. My own university students experienced a great deal of anxiety over this fact; after all, the word "email" was in the title of the project and if there was no email, would their grades suffer? Additionally, there were more than a few problems with the hardware at the elementary school which made coordinating visits from my students difficult, if not impossible.

The biggest hurdle to overcome, however, was transferring what my students had written into hypertext documents for posting on the web. At the start of the project, this was beyond my capabilities, so a great deal of the credit for the eventual success of this project must be given to the staff of our instructional computer lab. This highlights an important point. While many students come to us with impressive knowledge of technology, many others are as helpless as I was. This project allowed those who did have advanced skills to share them with their classmates. It afforded others a safe venue for acquiring and developing those skills and it is important to note that these students were overwhelmingly pleased with the project, especially for the insight it gave them into building and posting an actual webpage. Additionally, students were able to see the potential usefulness of webquests in their own classrooms; this is especially important for students majoring in subject not traditionally considered to be text/technology oriented, physical education among them.
 
 

As the fall semester came to a close, my own level of comfort with the webquest project grew and the hardware problems at the elementary school lessened. The one remaining problem, how to increase email communication, was solved by reconfiguring the connection. Beginning in the Spring 2000 semester, the project was now known as "The Webquest Connection"; there was no longer an email partnership between university and elementary students. The partnership was now between groups of university students and individual fourth- and fifth-grade teachers. I provided the groups with email addresses. They took it from there. They were simply to keep records of their correspondence. This they could manage. The resulting project was a relative success.

Although the revised Webquest Connection did not encourage writing to learn in the form of direct communication between the university and the elementary school students, both groups of students did experience the practical use of technology in the classroom in the form of the webquest lessons, a practical use of technology which would actually be more likely to be employed by the elementary classroom teachers. Unlike the original email connection project, which was extremely difficult to coordinate, the revised project allowed teachers more flexibility and therefore students were offered greater exposure to the technology.

My university students did visit the computer lab at the elementary school when groups of fourth- and fifth-grade students were scheduled to work with the individual webquests, so the elementary school students did experience some one-on-one attention. Eliminating the requirement that university students visit the elementary school during this very busy methods block semester made for much better student morale. It also allowed the spirit of volunteerism to flourish as those students who did visit the elementary school did so because they wanted to volunteer, not because they had to in order to pass the course! Finally, as with the original project, the revised Webquest Connection also allowed preservice secondary teachers first-hand exposure to the development of content area knowledge of elementary students, a primary goal of the project.
 
 

The Webquest Connection was a relative success, but more work has been done and even more remains. To begin, moving up to the middle school level, where students are more autonomous with computers, has resulted in increased success. Also, I have recently begun using a webquest designed to introduce teachers to webquests to do just that. "A Webquest about Webquests" (see The WebQuest Page) (Dodge, Byles, & Brooks, 2001), allows students to anticipate what types of things might give the sixth- and seventh-grade students trouble as they complete the webquests created for the course. Likewise, students can visit the course webquest page to examine and evaluate the webquests designed by students in the previous semester.

As technology continues to become more prevalent in secondary classrooms, it becomes increasingly important that new teachers be comfortable with new uses of that technology. As teacher educators, we are in a position to provide instruction and experiences which result in that comfort. The Webquest Connection, a project which could be replicated in virtually any teacher education program, allows preservice teachers to become comfortable with some aspects of technology within the context of their preparation for the profession of teaching. Such teachers will be an asset to school districts encouraging the practical use of technology in the classroom.
 
 

Dodge, B. (1995). Some thoughts about webquests [on-line]. Available: http://edweb.sdsu.edu/courses/edtec596/about_webquests.html
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Dodge, B., Byles, B., & Brooks, S. (2001). A webquest about webquests [on-line]. Available: http://www.memphis-schools.k12.tn.us/admin/tlapages/wq_wq2.htm
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Duhaney, D. (2001). Teacher education: Preparing teachers to integrate technology. International Journal of Instructional Media, 28 (1), p. 23-30.
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Willis, E. & Raines, P. (2001). Technology in secondary education. THE Journal, 29 (2), p. 554-59.
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Potential Usefulness

A continuing struggle in the literacy strategies course is the one against the I'm-not-going-to-be-a-reading-teacher-so-I-shouldn't-have-to-take-this-course mind set. The webquest project has been especially useful in helping my students see the potential for helping their students master content using text. The following quotes were taken from their final response papers and anonymous course evaluations for the fall 2001 and spring 2002 semesters:

 "[The webquest project] allowed me to apply [the course principles] completely to my area."

 "[The webquest project] was a good idea– it allowed us to be creative and apply it to our areas."

 "I feel that the webquest was the most interesting and fun activity we worked on during the semester. It gave everyone a chance to be creative in their content area and to actually help students to be excited about and learn about various subjects. I think that these webquests are a great supplement to any lesson plan. . . .Many of the webquests have interesting and fun links to keep students interested in hopes of extending their knowledge even further." Christy

 "The most important thing I learned about in this class was the webquest. I really think I will incorporate webquests as supplements to my lessons when I am teaching. . . .I feel they can be valuable as enrichment material." Aaron

 "The emphasis on developing a reading and learning strategy entirely on the web was the most important strategy that I've learned in this course all year long." Clay

 "It was fun to create something that real students will be using."

Learning about Technology

Overwhelmingly, students appreciated the opportunity to learn more about technology and its potential for application in their own classrooms. The following quotes were taken from their final response papers and anonymous course evaluations for the fall 2001 and spring 2002 semesters:
 

 "My computer skills are 100% better than they were at the beginning of the semester."

 "I really enjoyed designing our [webquests]. In the past I tried to avoid using computers whenever I could because I truly didn't have a clue beyond typing the usual papers. Being forced to create a [webquest] really helped me learn more about computers and gave me a sense of satisfaction when we were finished." Brandon

 "I feel that the absolute most useful thing that I did in this class this semester was the webquest. . . .it was incredibly interesting and helpful to learn how to design a [webquest], and I was really proud of our final webquest." Kate

 "I really enjoyed doing this project and I feel it was a great way to get me started on learning [how to build websites]." Jana

 "I now feel comfortable and capable with the program and will continue to use these skills when I teach." Aaron

Physical Education and the Webquest Project

The literacy strategies course offers students majoring in content areas not traditionally considered to be text oriented, physical education among them, to explore the possible uses of text in their own future classrooms; the webquest project has been particularly useful in this regard (see physical education webquests). The following quote was taken from the final response paper of a physical education major enrolled in the course in the spring 2002 semesters:
 

 "I really thought that the webquest projects turned out to be a very educational experience. When it was first introduced in class that we had to do the webquest project I was very skeptical. I thought to myself, "How is this applicable to physical education and how are my group members and I going to find things to do this project?" As we got the project moving my outlook really changed. My group and I had to construct a health webquest so we thought about things we could use in the project, and we came up with doing it on the debate over the legal drinking age in Wisconsin. It turned out to be a really good webquest and after it was all said and done I finally realized that a person can use reading and technology in any aspect of education, even health and physical education." Brad