Teaching about slavery can be a very tricky thing. Most teachers I had simply browsed over it like they would any other mundane subject. Slavery is anything but mundane though. I loved the ideas that this webquest presented. Essentially, different groups would take the role as either the north or south and create a publication. All of the groups also had to do research on current slavery issues. This part seemed extremely important to me because connected what we read in history books to what happens in our world. So many times when we talk about slavery in American classrooms, students do not realize that slavery did not end with the Emancipation Proclamation.

I felt the weakest part of this activity was the introduction and conclusion. While slavery is not the easiest thing to get kids excited about, this webquest makes no real attempt to get them interested in this very interesting topic. The conclusion basically outlined what they did and asked them to think about what they could do to end world wide slavery. So it made the effort to push them on to new thinking but could have done so much more with it.

The resources were mediocre. One risk of working with the internet is that it is an ever-changing source. A few the pages were not available anymore. There were plenty of available sources that did seem to pull from different domains; .com, .edu, and .org. Most of the sources did not allow the student to search at all and the students were taken right to the content. The students were asked to complete a timeline and the link was a timeline. The only thing students learn from this is how to copy and paraphrase. No video or sound was used but the internet was necessary to research current issues in slavery.

With just a few tweaks, this could become a very powerful and eye-opening webquest.