Web Quests

WebQuests are interactive journeys that learners can make to find specific information using the internet and then report back on it in various ways.  They bring ICT to task based learning and can be very motivating for learners.

This is a link to a ready made WebQuest in which you plan for a trip to Australia.  The introduction states:

In this Webquest your objective is to find out about the culture and lifestyle in Australia. When you go there, what differences do you find? What do you like and dislike about it? What do you miss from your own country? What would you like to bring back from Australia?

and then there are five tasks to complete.  These practise all four skills and also include a lot of helpful functional language. The first task, for example, asks learners to use certain sites to find out specific information, giving them lots of practice in reading.

But it's not all about using the net to find information - the learners are also required to do something with it! 

So, after they have found out the information, there are speaking and writing exercises, including sentence stems to help with language activation (although there would probably need to be some teacher input on the 'I wonder (whether/ if)' structures, too).

There is a wide range of material here, covering grammatical areas such as comparatives and superlatives as well as the functional language. Plenty for several lessons.  In fact, that might be my only real criticism - by the time you get to the end of it, you might well be heartily sick of the subject!

There are lots of WebQuests ready made and available on the net.  The original idea was:

'developed by Bernie Dodge at San Diego State University in February, 1995 with early input from SDSU/Pacific Bell Fellow Tom March, the Educational Technology staff at San Diego Unified School District, and waves of participants each summer at the Teach the Teachers Consortium.'

and their website has loads of resources, There is also a linked site - Quest Garden which has templates to make your own WebQuests. You can register for a free trial for 30 days, or sign up and pay for a member ship, but it's only $20 for a 2 year subscription, so it won't break the bank!  Making your own might be very helful if you were, for example, teaching CLIL and had specific content that you needed to cover. Other than that and if you are teaching general English, making your own is a lot of work and  there are many good WebQuests already out there so you could use 'off-the-peg' ones!