Wiki-Webquest: A Collaborative Activity on the Information and Communication Technologies Applied to an Education Course

Abstract

European Higher Education Institutions are involved in a deep reform in order to adapt themselves to the far reaching set of reforms posed by European Higher Education Area. One of the main changes their teachers have to face up consists on the methodological restructuring of their classes. Thus, it is necessary to reflect on new teacher education methods. This is what we have been proposing within a mandatory undergraduate course on ICT (Information and Communication Technologies applied to Education) to preservice teachers at the College of Education in the University of Valladolid (Spain). The course relies on an Inquiry Based Learning (IBL) approach supported by a Wiki-based environment adapted to the needs of the course. A set of collaborative activities is presented to our students by using this technology. In this article we introduce one of those activities, the elaboration of a Wiki-WebQuest. From this activity, we pretend to show some lights and shadows emerged during the process of knowledge building (the versatility and flexibility of the tool, the possibility given by it to promote collaboration among different Institutions and their students, unsuitability of some content to the specific course, lack of advisory from teachers to primary students about how to use these new tools, etc.) The experience was developed in collaboration with two real primary schools, serving as case studies to design a Wiki-WebQuest for. It was also implemented in collaboration with two other undergraduate courses (Didactic and Foreign Language Methodology), with the aim of enriching the learning process.