An Update to an Old Web Quest Assignment

I've been doing a lot of reading this summer. Some of the books that I've been reading this summer are books that I've read in the past but am revisiting because I've always found that I pick up new things the second or third time through. Two of those books that I've revisited this summer are Invent to Learn by Sylvia Libow Martinez and Gary Stager and Empowering Online Learning by Curtis Bonk and Ke Zhang. The combination has sparked some new ideas (perhaps re-ignited) for me about how to structure prompts for students.

Early in Empowering Online Learning Bonk and Zhang write about conducting a web quest or online scavenger hunt activity. They were writing in 2007/2008 when web quests were still a relatively new activity to many teachers who were trying to help students develop search skills. The example that Bonk and Zhang gave was essentially a list of questions for students to answer with the help of a search engine.

As I re-read the web quest activity outlined by Bonk and Zhang I remembered Stager's refrain of "a good prompt is worth a thousand words." Combining those two elements I came up with an update to an old search lesson activity that I used to do with some of my high school students.

The old search activity that I used to do with students was to have them pick a popular stock from the NYSE or NASDAQ and then find and evaluate buy/ sell/ hold articles they found about those stocks. The updated version of that lesson is to have students look up ten data points (for example: volume, short interest, cash flow, EPS) about a stock like AAPL (Apple) and then research ten ways that a professional analyst would use those data points to create a buy/ sell/ hold rating.

Three Lessons on the Chemistry of Coffee

One of the things that I've missed the most over the last few months is going to my local coffee shop (Cafe Nomad) and having some of the excellent coffee that they brew. Try as I might, the coffee I brew at home just isn't the same quality of what they make at the cafe. (I also miss the community aspect of sitting in the cafe with friends). So what is it that goes into a perfect cup of coffee? A big part of that answer is found in the science of coffee. Reactions, one of my favorite YouTube channels, has a great video that explains the chemistry of coffee. I particularly like that the video explains chemical differences between light, medium, and dark roast coffees.



What's Actually Inside an Average Cup of Coffee? is a video that was produced by Wired. The video provides a short run-down of the chemical contents of brewed coffee.



I can count on one hand the number of times I've had decaffeinated coffee, but I still find How Do You Decaffeinate Coffee? published by Brain Stuff to be interesting. In How Do You Decaffeinate Coffee? viewers again learn about the chemicals in coffee and how how to remove the caffeine from coffee.



All three of these videos are good candidates for use in an online science lessons created with EDpuzzle. Here's an overview of how to use EDpuzzle.