What is a Treasure Hunt?  

Read on to find out from Tom March........

"When it's time to develop some solid knowledge on a subject, teachers and students can create Treasure Hunts. The basic strategy here is to find Web pages that hold information (text, graphic, sound, video, etc.) that you feel is essential to understanding the given topic. Maybe you gather 10 - 15 links (and remember, these are the exact pages you want the students to go to for information, not the top page of a huge Web site). After you've gathered these links, you pose one key question for each Web site you've linked to.

A smartly designed Treasure Hunt can go far beyond finding unrelated nuggets of knowledge. By choosing questions that define the scope or parameters of the topic, when the students discover the answers they are tapping into a deeper vein of thought, one that now stakes out the dimensions or schema of the domain being studied. Finally, by including a culminating "Big Question," students can synthesize what they have learned and shape it into a broader understanding of the big picture."