An activity that we should be including in our curriculum is Web Quests. These are activities where students are given links by the teacher to various websites which are used to answer questions the teacher supplies. The advantage of this activity is that the students are guided to the website, so there is no worry that they are looking at questionable content, and they do not waste time "searching" the entire World Wide Web for the information.
The web quest will require the student to read. High school students are "digital natives", meaning they grew up entirely in an age of technology, and are much more comfortable reading information from a computer screen than from a book. By reading from the Internet (as opposed to a textbook) the time-on-task is greatly increased.
These Web Quests can be done in every class and in every subject area. All it takes is a teacher who is willing to search for some reliable and content specific websites and create some questions based on those sites. With the availability technology in the form of the library computers and the mobile labs, there should be no problem having access to the technology at any period of the day.
I hope you consider endorsing the use of web quests in the classroom. If you would like, I can develop a PD on the topic to explain the advantages to all of the teachers in the building.
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