Actually creating an inquiry-based activity was quite valuable for me. Honestly, I thought I would be able to quickly throw this together. I found instead that answers to questions were decentralized and I had a difficult time finding them from reliable sources. I found myself frustrated, and I can only imagine the frustration my students would have felt.
I had just kind of come up with questions, questions I know the answer to because I'm a college senior, but then when I had to actually FIND these answers, I ended up revising questions because they were way too difficult to find outside a text book. This is actually something I view as a weakness of Web-based activities: textbooks are boring, but they offer a lot of information in a small space. This is something the web rarely offers, because information on the web for an 8th grade audience is decentralized, while textbook grade information is outside the ZPD of most middle schoolers. And so teacher have to balance it all out all of the time.
But it does give me a good lesson in creating activities: I should always do the activity first and be able to do it well. To skip this step puts into jepoardy my entire activity.
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