WebQuest Site Wins MERLOT Award

Today in Vancouver, the SDSU WebQuest page received the MERLOT Editor's Choice Award! It was nominated by the Teacher Education Editorial Board shown here, and they've turned out to be a lively and fun group. MERLOT is a fairly new organization dedicated to finding, evaluating and cataloging resources useful to those in higher ed.

They named the WebQuest site as their pick for the MERLOT Classic award for best Teacher Ed site of 2003 last May. After that, another vote was taken across all the disciplines to name sites that were more universally useful, and we received the Editor's Choice award for that. I'll be posting the award logo very proudly on the site. (Better still: I'll be getting an engraved bottle of Merlot!)

Minot WebQuesters Make the News

The Minot Daily News covered the Lewis & Clark WebQuest workshop that ran for five days last week. Not only that, we were on the evening news on two channels!

Craig Nansen of Minot Public Schools pulled together a fabulous group of technology leaders for this week. They were mostly comfortable to adept in web editing and all very well versed in smart curriculum design. One of the 19 there was a walking encyclopedia of Lewis and Clark lore. As part of the week we went on a digital photography frenzy on field trips to Fort Mandan, the Knife River Indian Villages, and the cottonwoods at Smith Grove.

North Dakota is looking forward to a tourist boom next year as the bicentennial of the Corps of Discovery approaches. Lewis and Clark spent more time in North Dakota than in any other state. It was here that Sacagawea joined the journey.

The draft WebQuests created by the group were amazingly good, especially when you consider that this was a first WebQuest for all of them and that they only started writing on Wednesday morning and finished Friday at noon. It will be great to see how far they take them over the next few months.