Ellis Island WebQuest 

Designed by: Claude Covo-Farchi, Solange Soinard,
 Florence Viquerat and Philip Benz

Teacher's Notes

This activity was a collaborative effort, based in part on several existing WebQuests, but simplified and adapted for our ESL students here in France.

This WebQuest is designed to take two class hours on the internet, with one or more hours spent in class before going to the internet, working on thematically related documents or brainstorming for the activity, and at least one hour in class helping students prepare for the final composition which they will do individually.

Lesson Plan for Ellis Island and Immigration

Sessions 1 & 2: Study one of the many texts on Ellis Island and immigration to America to be found in most textbooks. Pay special attention to the vocabulary students may need in order to understand the websites used in the subsequent WebQuest, and to write about the immigration experience

At the end of this part, you can distribute the WebQuest worksheet, and ask students to prepare the first section, "Imagine", where students select one of the two roles (immigrant or immigration officer) and answer the five questions associated with each role. Ideally, since students will be working in teams of two on the computer, each pair should consisit of one student taking the role of immigrant, and one taking the role of immigration officer.

Sessions 3 & 4: Using their worksheet, students will do the Ellis Island virtual field trip with their partner, following the link given. On the internet, you may want to have students do the vocabulary exercies either prior or immediately after visiting each stop. It really depends on the students. If they understand the short texts at each stop on the Ellis Island virtual field trip, then they can wait until they've finished their visit. But if they encounter difficulties, especially if they pester you for vocabulary explanations while visiting the stops, suggest that they do the associated exercise before continuing to the next stop. If all your students work very quickly, you may not need a second hour on the internet; however my experience is that most of them will benefit from the additional online time a second class session can give them.

For students who finish quickly, suggest that they visit some of the additional resources listed at the bottom of the Ellis Island WebQuest page. Students who finish quickly probably have fewer problems reading texts in English, so they should be better able to digest the more challenging webpages on these sites.

At the end of this part, tell students to use their notes and write up their description of the immigration process at Ellis Island for the next class period. Suggest they use complete sentences, as well as linking words like first, next, then, and so on. You can collect this written work for grading if you like, but I suggest simply using it as preparation for the final phase of the WebQuest.

Session 5: In the classroom, distribute the Diary Template and ask students to prepare their diary entry. Students should do this work individually, but having help from their partner can help them surmount difficulties. Since each pair of students will have different roles, their compositions will be different even if they are working together. Ask for the final draft of their diary entry to be turned in for the following class session, as this leaves them time to polish up their work at home, if necessary.

Session 6: Optionally, instead of having the final production take the form of written work, yuou can ask students to read their diary entry to the class. If so, you'll need to modify the evaluation rubric slightly.

Evaluating student work: The evaluation rubric proposed at the bottom of the main WebQuest page is intended to reward students who work dilligently even if their level of expression in English is lower than their classmates. Only 20% of the final grade is based on their final written work (or final oral presentation, if you choose that option). Students who don't take the activity seriously and spend their classtime or internet time goofing off will get a low grade. I strongly encourage you to check off student work during each class session on the internet or during diary preparation in the classroom. If everyone in your class is working seriously, they will probably get full marks for those parts of the rubric. Hopefully this will encourage them to work with similar dilligence in subsequent units!

Carpe diem!

The obstacles to using English language websites with our struggling non-anglophone students are many. One of the reasons we selected the Scholastic.com virtual field trip was that it had relatively short bits of text on each page, supported by pictures and a graphical representation of the immigration experience that made it more accessible to our students than many more authoritative or informative sites. Most of these other potentially useful sites were included in the "Additional Resources" section, but frankly they are beyond all but the most advanced students I have ever had in my classrooms.

We decided that even with the Scholastic.com site, most of our students were going to need major scaffolding in the form of vocabulary help to really get anything out of their experience. That help can take two forms. First, I do this WebQuest only after studying a text from the students' textbook dealing with Ellis Island or some aspect of immigration. Nearly all of our textbooks approach the subject to some extent, and if necessary, you can easily borrow an appropriate text if your textbook isn't so equipped. By working in advance on thematically related documents, students are able to gather some of the vital ammunition they'll need when facing 100% target language materials on the internet. Secondly, we decided to integrate some vocabulary exercises created with the excellent Hot Potatoes software suite right into the activity, as you can see on the "Vocabulary" page.

The other vitally important part of any effective internet-based activity is written worksheets. Students remember so much more of their internet experience when they have to write things down using old-fashioned pens and paper. That's also why I always try to have my students work in pairs, so on each computer one student is pointing and clicking while the other is busy pushing her pen across a worksheet.

I used this WebQuest with my students in November 2001, and found it worked very well. They had read and worked on an extract from an immigrant's diary in their textbook, and while they were waiting for the computers to start and the website to load (close to 15 minutes altogether!) they were able to write down their ideas for the "pre-reading" part of the student worksheet. We had a slow internet connection that day, and by the end of the first hour, few of my students had had time to visit all eight stops. So, in our next class period, we returned to the internet, and they were able to complete their notes and do many of the vocabulary activities. We then spent a further class period back in our regular classroom, where students wrote the first drafts of their diary pages in an open atmosphere, where they were free to ask me questions, help each other, or consult dictionaries or their textbook. Students then had until the following week to complete their diary pages and hand in the final version.

A number of the teaching aids you now find on this site were only completed after the test run I describe here. The first worksheet is the same one my students used, but the diary template is something I added later, that would really have helped them if I'd made it up beforehand. I also sent my students to the online vocabulary exercises only after they had finished visiting the Scholastic.com site, which in hindsight was a mistake. They would have found these exercises more helpful before viewing the site, and would have gotten more out of their visit from having juggled the definitions in advance. Live and learn.

The evaluation rubric is also something I added only recently. While I did have the five criteria in mind when I graded my students, I can't say I used them systematically, as the detailed grid suggests. But I'll try to be more careful the next time around, and I think it'll help the students to see a description of what a really top performance requires from them, so they can attempt to model their behavior on what their teacher expects from them.

So, those are some of my thoughts on this WebQuest, off the cuff and in the rough. If you use this activity with your students, please let me know how it went, and we'll see if there's anything we can change for the next time around.

Post-scriptum: It is now 2007, and the above notes were compiled some 5 years ago. This WebQuest has been linked to from many, many sites, and I've used it myself once or twice in each of the years I've taught since its conception. My thanks again to Claude Covo-Farchi, Solange Soinard and Florence Viquerat who were part of the original team who created it. It has found a new home on the Anglais Orléans-Tours website, and I hope that other teachers will continue to find it useful. WebQuests continue to be one of the most popular and effective forms of web activities, and although many activities wearing the "WebQuest" label don't really correspond to the full-fledge definitions inspired from the work of pioneers like Bernie Dodge and Tom March, more and more teachers are reaching out to more complex and satisfying forms of web-based inquiry.

Please feel free to contact me with any additiopnal ideas or comments regarding this WebQuest.

Cheers,   --- Philip Benz

Credits: We consulted many existing WebQuests on Ellis Island, but borrowed most heavily from these two.

America, Here I Come, by Christine Johnson and Lee Mongrue

Coming to a New Land, by Priscilla Boersma

This activity can be found at http://anglais.tice.ac-orleans-tours.fr/php5/fichiers/Webquests/benz/ellisisland/ellisislandwebquest.htm

For more information contact Philip Benz.