Travelling to the Seven Wonders of the World

Travelling to the Seven Wonders of the World

A WebQuest for Secondary 4 and 5 students (ESL)

Corrine Chabot, Jérémi Dalpé, Doria Ayadi and Boubakeur Laatar

Image courtesy of: Clipart, from Microsoft Office

Introduction

Over the next six classes, you will all become experts of the Seven Wonders of the World. Imagine that you are travel agents, tour guides, geographers and historians who are specialized in one of the Seven Wonders of the World. These wonders are chosen amongst the natural wonders, man-made wonders, ancient wonders and medieval wonders of the world. Your job is to learn about your wonder, then educate others on your wonder. You will do so by researching many aspects of your wonder in order to create a travel brochure and a video advertisement that you will present to tourists who are interested in discovering the Seven Wonders of the World. This presentation will be held at the ‘International Tourism Symposium’, and you need to be ready to ‘sell’ your wonder to the tourists as you make a wealthy commission for every package you sell.

Essentially, your role is to discover and illustrate why YOUR wonder is the best one to visit and why it is worthy of being included in the Seven Wonders of the World?

The Task

At the Tourism Symposium, there will be groups representing such wonders as: the Great Barrier Reef, the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, the Tower of Pisa, and the Pyramids. Each kiosk at the convention will represent one of these wonders and will be the responsibility of a group of four people. Each person within the group will be responsible for gathering and providing certain information about the wonder. You are all experts of one aspect of ‘selling’ your wonder. The tourists attending the convention are very curious as to why your wonder is being represented, about the history and description of the wonder and the logistics to visiting the wonder in order to establish if the wonder is worthy of visiting or not. At your kiosk, you will have to present your video advertisement, your brochure, and are responsible for decorating your kiosk with maps and pictures. You may also want to play music that is common to the country of your wonder in order to recreate the atmosphere one may find in that country. Finally, taking turns with your team mates, you will explore the other kiosks and act as the ‘tourist’ inquiring about the other wonders represented by your classmates. Your goal as a ‘tourist’ is to vote on the best wonder based on how it is represented by your classmates.

The Process

1. First thing you will do: take out a piece of paper and try to write down all the wonders you already know. Once you are done, you will share the list with your classmates. Then, to see how many you got right, you will go onto the site: http://wonderclub.com/AllWorldWonders.html

2. In order to give you some general background information, you will look at the following site. The information found under HISTORY in this site will give you a better understanding of what the Seven Wonders of the World are, why and how the list was created and why certain wonders made the list:

Wonder of the World: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Seven_Wonders_of_the_World

3. Next, you will be divided into groups of four and you will be given one of the Seven Wonders which your group will be responsible for.

4. Now, here are links that will guide you in creating your travel brochure. However, remember that you can be as original and creative as you want:

Brochure template

Travel Brochure Outline

5. Now, to give you an idea of how you may want to develop your video, things you may want to include in your video, or just to inspire you in creating your video, you will look at the following sites. Remember, you can be as original and as creative as you wish:

Travelistic: Videos for Travellers: http://www.travelistic.com/

Passports: http://www.passports.com/trips/video_index.asp

6. Once you have viewed the templates to give you ideas for what is expected of you in creating a brochure, and a short video, your team will follow the link to your group’s wonder. This step will guide you to specific information on your wonder and your individual tasks. The knowledge acquired through these links will be useful for knowing what information to include in your brochures, in your video and for becoming experts of your wonder for the convention later on.

The Great Barrier Reef

The Grand Canyon

The Great Pyramids

The Leaning Tower of Pisa

The Great Wall of China

The Taj Mahal

The Niagara Falls

7. Once you have gathered all the information appropriate to your task by going on your personal WebQuest, you are to make the brochure as a group of four. The brochure need not be more than 4 pages.

8. Upon completing your brochure, in your groups, you will now make the video. If you do not have a digital video camera to your disposal, you will reserve the school’s camera by seeing me. Videos should be no longer than 5 minutes, and the tasks in making your video should be done cooperatively.

9. Finally, it is time for you to prepare your kiosk to get ready for the Tourism Symposium. You will need to organize all the aesthetic materials that you will need in order to advertise your wonder, like: maps, pictures, music and so on, and prepare all the logistics to present your video. You will have roughly a half hour to present in all, yet only two people at a time will be responsible for managing the kiosk. Therefore you will be at your kiosk for 15 minutes in total. In teams of two, you will present your video, your brochure and answer any questions that the ‘tourists’ may have. At this time, the other two people in your group will visit the other kiosks and act as a ‘tourist’. You will have a peer evaluation form that you will need to fill out based on the other kiosks.

Evaluation

You will be evaluated by your peers, by your teacher and you will be evaluating yourself. The Peer evaluation will be done at the convention and you will be given a group mark out of ten. The teacher evaluation will be completed after the convention and will be given back to you, with feedback, the following class. This evaluation will be for individual grades and will be worth twenty marks. Finally, you will be evaluating yourself and are asked to write a reflection. You will take the average of the points that you attributed to yourself, in order to give yourself a mark out of 5. Overall, this project will be out of 35 %. You will find all the evaluation sheets listing the criteria of your evaluation by clicking on the following links:

Self Evaluation Form

Peer Evaluation Form

Teacher Evaluation Form

Conclusion

After you have all become experts on the wonder explored by your group, and have been exposed to the other wonders of the other groups through the convention, you will have enough knowledge to be able to define what makes a wonder worthy of achieving such a world renowned list. As a class, you will now have to reflect on what you have learned through accomplishing this project in order to come up with a new wonder to add to the list. There has recently been a contest for adding new wonders to the list.

Check out this site to see what World wonders were nominated and which ones won: http://www.new7wonders.com/

Visit this site to see which Canadian wonders were nominated and which ones won: http://www.cbc.ca/sevenwonders/index.html

Visit this site to see what other students think should be the Seven Wonders of the World: http://library.thinkquest.org/J002388/ourwonders.html

Your job is to add a new wonder to the list. Can you come up with a Canadian wonder that you think should be added? After looking at all these links, write down your nomination and reason for nominating it. Then we will look at our nominations as a class.

Credits & References

Thanks to the following sites for their free images:

http://www.nps.gov/grca/

http://www.fishcat.com/india/pix/agra/tajmahal-big.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Niagara3573.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Leaning_Tower_of_Pisa

http://www.crystalinks.com/chinawall.html

http://www.guardians.net/egypt/pyramids.htm

http://www.greatadventures.com.au/

Thanks to Bits, Bytes and Chips for the Brochure Template

Special thanks to Ron Mastine and Marianne Gazaille for their help and support.