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Page 1 of 2 In the Part One of this series, we introduced the WebQuest and a bit of its history. We learned that this lesson in a Web page allows students to make safe use of Internet resources. We also discussed the six sections that make up a traditional WebQuest, and how the WebQuest should be more than mere fact-finding. Finally, we looked at the completed version of the "Time Machine MTV" WebQuest that we're going to reconstruct from scratch. The moment to do that is now upon us, so let's get started.
Please download the exercise files from the bottom of this page to an accessible location on your computer. I have my students place them in the Sites folder on the Mac, or My Documents on the PC.
Note: I am targeting the level of this tutorial towards school teachers, kids, and Dreamweaver beginners. If you are a trainer of any of these groups, you will encounter a wide range of computer skills. My directions try to help you anticipate the problems your new WebQuesters might encounter.
Tip: Though our tutorial assumes the installation of some version of Dreamweaver, there are schools that can't afford it. I recently gave a WebQuest workshop to 40 teachers at a school that uses a lab full of donated PCs with only 64 ram each. The tech support staff downloaded Netscape 7 so that the teachers could use its component Web editor called Composer (no pun intended!) to create their WebQuests. I include alternate directions in today's exercise files so that you will have them in case you find yourself in this situation.
I will assume that you already know how to define a site in Dreamweaver. If not, please read Defining a Site in DreamweaverMX - The Basic Tab by Laurie Casolino. You will almost always have to train teachers to define sites, even if they claim to know Dreamweaver well. Their first urge is to always go into the folder on the hard drive and double-click files from there. I work at a Catholic college, so I tell my students that they should pretend that Dreamweaver is the priest and the files are God. This means that they should not approach the files directly, and should only communicate with them through the priest, that is, a defined Dreamweaver site window. That analogy seems to give the concept a little more immediacy. You'll come up with your own appropriate analogies, I am sure.
In any case, our site definition for this tutorial is quite simple. I went to Sites>Manage Sites, and chose the New button. I used the Advanced tab, which in some cases is actually easier to configure. We only need two entries for our WebQuest. In the Local Info category I entered the site name and local root folder. I named my site cmx_webquest and navigated to the exercise files in the Sites or My Documents folder.
Figure 1 - The Site Definition
Note: While I tell my students that they need to contact their school technology department to ask about making their WebQuests public, I do make them aware of some of their options for publishing.
Teachers may choose to take their WebQuests live in one of the following ways:
If you have your site definition complete, let's begin assembling WebQuest.
Figure 2 - Create a new page from template dialog box
As you probably know, templates are made up of editable regions and locked regions. The locked regions are a way of "saving us from ourselves" so that we don't accidentally delete important data. Inexperienced teachers often inadvertently delete named anchors, "back to the top" links, and other fixed parts of the page. By putting these features into locked regions of the template, the functionality of the WebQuest will remain intact.
Tip: Teachers often include their email addresses because of the sharing ethic that surrounds WebQuests. If you want to protect your address from spammers, you should encode it or use other methods to keep from getting flooded with unwanted junk mail.
You should now have four images lined up in a row. If not, you can widen your browser window so that they all fit. If a school has small monitors, you might want to enter only three of the images in the row.
Figure 3 - Four composers in a row
Keywords
Dreamweaver, Netscape Composer, WebQuest, Web Quest, education, teachers, teaching, students, home school, homeschool
