I’ve got more and more respect, these days, for the humble webquest. Slash hyperdoc. Slash game board. Slash immersive digital multimedia experience. Slash clickable infographic. Slash playlist. Slash choice board.
When it comes to sharing information and contemporary texts with your students, there is SO MUCH available online right now. Students can see actors practicing behind the scenes at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Read John Green’s thoughts on drafting. Hear Jason Reynolds’ read his children’s book, There was a Party for Langston, while the illustrations wash across the screen. Students can learn MLA with Purdue, watch Joy Harjo read her own poetry, listen to our country’s top researchers and academics and start-up founders on podcasts and Ted stages.
So cool, right?
With so many immersive, multimodal resources waiting for our students, building their roadmaps to what’s available becomes an important (and fun) job.
We want to present them with great options, and help them feel positive and excited about the experience of exploring. We want to give them possibilities across modes and from many perspectives, so students can use their agency to learn in ways that feel good to them, and connect to at least some aspects of what they discover. We want to provide options in terms of how they synthesize the information they take in so they can use it later.
As I see it, here are some of the benefits to building quality webquests for students:
- students have choice in what to explore, starting with what seems most interesting to them and continuing to make choices until they’re out of time
- plugging in to the kinds of contemporary connections available online (like listening to author interviews, visiting settings, seeing adaptations, and viewing connected social media) can often make learning feel more relevant for students
- you can build in resources across genres and modes, letting students listen, watch, read, explore, view, and zoom in according to their preferences
- it’s easier to provide more viewpoints, voices, and perspectives, helping you to diversify your curriculum
- sharing a webquest is less stressful than giving a lecture, and more likely to keep students engaged
- you’ll save a tree, since photocopying a packet of information won’t be necessary
- you can take advantage of the incredible wealth of informational resources available online
Today on the pod, let’s talk through some examples. Oh, and before we dive in, be sure to grab the free templates that complement the episode! These are meant to make this whole process quick and easy for you as you get started, and then you can go on to develop your own. Sign up for my free teaching idea emails below, and they’ll be the first thing I send your way!
OK, let’s dive in! You can tune in below, or on any podcast player right here.
So hopefully I’ve convinced you that a good webquest has a lot to offer right now, so let’s drill down and walk through some examples.
Building a Micro Webquest for Shakespeare
OK, let’s start with a quick webquest you might include with a Shakespeare unit. I recently discovered just how wonderful the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Instagram feed can be, for giving small looks behind the scenes of contemporary Shakespeare. Whether it’s a “stylized neo noir game adaptation of Macbeth” or a look at the lighting design for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, these short videos provide a fascinating, modern look at professional theater right now. But I don’t just want to send students into the RSC’s feed and hope for the best. I want to send them where I want them to go. So with the intention of letting them explore for ten minutes or so with a partner, I can create a micro webquest pointing them to specific reels I’d like them to see.
First, I designed a little Shakespeare themed template in Canva in a square template, dropping a graphic of the Globe theater in, and then overlaying boxes where I could put my text. (You can grab this template, and many more shown in this post, for free right here).
The next step is to drop the template onto a Slide and start adding the links I want students to explore. You can see my example side by side with the template below.
As students explore, you can give them guiding questions to consider in preparation for an activity which will follow, or give them an activity to complete while they explore. Try to avoid comprehension questions that are just asking them to prove they visited the links.
A third option – particularly if your webquest is longer than this miniature version – you can ask them to choose their own way to present back what they’ve learned, whether it’s a sketchnote, an infographic, an illustration, a reflection paragraph, etc. Right now I’m taking a course that always leaves the form of the final product of the unit entirely up to me, and I couldn’t love it more. It allows me to practice the skills that I want to improve, and use modes that make sense to me to convey my ideas. It makes my learning feel relevant to my work, which is exactly what I hoped when I began the course.
Here’s another twist on this same Shakespeare webquest foundation. This time, instead of including a reel library, I included a variety of media to help provide background knowledge for a Shakespeare unit. If I wanted to, under the “Explore the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Video Feed on Instagram” box, I could link to the micro webquest above, providing the specific five reels I think provide helpful perspectives to students.
Building an MLA Resource Shelf Webquest
OK, here’s a different sort of example from my own recent work. As I was creating materials for students to better understand and use MLA, I knew I wanted to help them sort the wheat from the chaff in terms of online generators and guides. A quick webquest/clickable resource shelf could double as an ongoing resource I could drop into any curriculum set with a research aspect, so students would always be a click away from a reliable guide to the citation format of choice and a decent citation generator.
This type of digital shelf can be helpful for all kinds of things, including providing resources that help to scaffold work for students. Once you have a digital shelf that helps you explain literary devices, transitions, citation, sensory detail, advice for college essays, etc. you can link it anytime from project descriptions, writing activities, task cards, etc.
Building a Collection of Mentors
Another helpful use for a webquest is to provide students with choice over mentors they might like to explore building up to a project, like a podcast, documentary, research project, or personal essay. Once again, you can provide students with a wide variety of voices and let them choose who they want to learn from.
Another option would be to invite students to submit possibilities for mentors. Professor Felicia Rose Chavez centers a full class around this idea, which she calls “The Inspiration Lab” in her book, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop (104). You could also add an area on your digital mentor choice board inviting students to choose one or two personal mentor texts to complement the options you’re providing, so they get some balance in exploring resources you suggest as well as pursuing a mentor they’re excited about personally.
Below on the left, you’ll see a choice board of mentors with the orange section devoted to students finding a film theme song that they personally find exceptional. On the right, a prepared set of digital shelves to either house student-submitted poetry (after a quick vet by the teacher), or a diverse collection of possibilities that you curate and can then return to time and again, inviting students to “choose a poem from the shelf with your partner and…” or “choose a poem from the shelf to write about as we…” In this way you give students more voices to explore and more agency as they go about their exploring.
More Examples
Here’s another example. My goal with this top design is simply to provide a visual reminder in the webquest creation process to bring many voices to the table. You could fill this webquest with articles, videos, podcasts, poems, etc., and/or, so could your students.
In the examples below, there’s room to create a webquest showing how a team might work together creatively. In his book, Participatory Creativity: Introducing Access and Equity to the Creative Classroom, Edward Clapp questions the way we tend to model a single creator as the epitome of creativity, when many cultures value collective community effort. Imagine if, for example, you wanted students to learn more about Hamilton. Rather than linking to information exclusively about Lin Manuel Miranda, you might link to interviews across the cast, lighting design team, costume creators, program designers, assistant composers, etc. It took a team to make Hamilton a legend, even if one amazing musical genius is at the center of that team.
Webquest: Embedding Exploration in an Assignment
So far, we’ve looked at webquests and digital shelves that stand alone as an activity, but you can also embed online exploration into your assignment sheets, like in the examples below.
For the webquest on the cultural revolution, students will examine history from multimodal primary and secondary sources they can click to online, before creating a short podcast script to showcase what they found important as they explored.
For the webquest on the right, as students are working on a piece of illustrated Flash Verse during a unit on Long Way Down, they can explore adjacent work by Jason Reynolds, including a trailer for Ain’t Burned all the Bright, a read-aloud with visuals of his children’s book There was a Party for Langston, a read-aloud with visuals of a part of a Long Way Down, and an interview with Reynolds about his graphic novel collaboration with Danica Novgorodoff. None of these explorations is required, and students will spend however long they wish with each, but each provides a possible stepping stone toward new ways of thinking about creating an illustrated text.
Synthesizing the Webquest
The first webquests I designed, many years ago, had a lot in common with handouts of comprehension questions. I was excited to get students discovering information online, and I wanted to make sure they found each information nugget that was waiting. I might say “Explore the map and find the neighborhood where XYZ happened. Describe it in three sentences.” Or maybe “Watch the video and create a brief timeline of important events in XYZ year here,” etc.
These days I’ve moved away from mapping each piece of a digital exploration to a check-it-off question. I’d rather students be generating a list of questions for discussion, creating a sketchnote synthesizing what seems important to them, getting inspiration for a creative project of their own, or responding to what they’ve explored through their own choice of mode.
Start Simple
OK, my friend, you’ve got everything you need to know to launch your next webquest! Start simple; just grab a template and begin experimenting with the wonderful array of multimodal resources and mentors waiting out there!
Sources Considered and Cited:
Beers, Kylene and Robert Probst. Disrupting Thinking: Why How We Read Matters. Scholastic, 2017.
- This book features a helpful look at why relevance is key to engagement. Read more in this blog post.
Chavez, Felicia Rose. The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop. Haymarket Books, 2021.
- Felicia Rose Chavez talks about letting students have a voice in the texts that form the curriculum, and “completing the canon” (97) to go well beyond the white Eurocentric voices so often enshrined there.
Clapp, Edward. “5+3 = 8: The Eight Barriers to Access and Equity in the Creative Classroom.” Participatory Creativity: Introducing Access and Equity to the Creative Classroom. MSU Article Retrieval Service. Accessed October 2025.
- The chapter from Edward Clapp discusses sharing models of creativity that don’t just reflect individual creatives working in isolation, but also collective and collaborative creativity.
Rodriguez-Mojica, Claudia and Allison Briceño. Conscious Classrooms. PD Essentials, 2022. (+ Related Podcast Interview).
- Claudia and Rodriguez-Mojica and Allison Briceño showcase the increase in student performance when they can see themselves in the texts they read.
Muhammad, Gholdy. Cultivating Genius. Scholastic Teaching Resources, 2020.
- Gholdy Muhammad’s Cultivating Genius calls for us to layer contemporary multimodal texts into our curriculum, something that reinforced my own long-term interest in this possibility.
Ivcevic, Zorana. The Creativity Choice. Public Affairs, 2025.
“Research-Based Practices to Ignite Creativity, with Dr. Zorana Ivcevic Pringle.” The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast. Episode 393. September, 2025.
- Ivcevic suggests that teachers use models and mentors of creative thought that allow students to see themselves, both in terms of their identity and in terms of the level of creativity.
Stockman, Angela. Creating Inclusive Writing Environments in the K-12 Classroom. Eye on Education, 2020.
- Angela’s work on multimodal texts, makerspace freedom, and creating more inclusive curriculum is helpful in this conversation.
