Tuesday, April 8th, 2008

I recently taught a 2 session seminar on using Global Positioning Satellites in education at CTAP6's ETC! 2008 conference.  About a dozen people signed up and participated in nearly 3 hours of tracking satellites and walking around the grounds of Modesto California's newest high school,  Enochs High School.

Since I did not have time for individual instruction, I chose 2 standards at random to use as examples of how GPS and GPS units can be applied to the classroom, can meet standards, and can therefore help improve (or least fail to hinder) test scores.  But every GPS in education seminar must start with an explanation of geocaching.  [http://www.geocaching.com]  I'll refrain from that here because you can use the link provided to peruse the site and read the FAQ if you're not familiar with the activity/hobby/sport of geocaching.

Having dispensed wit h the explanation I was able to move on to more applicable topics.  First was a 20 minute lesson on the GPS units themselves.  You have to know how to use the darn thing before you can apply it to your curriculum!  When everyone was finally familiar enough with manipulating the GPS devices, we took off on a hunt.

The first standard I chose was one that I thought would not be obvious to most folks who have an interested in GPS, 8th grade English.  In this case, GPS is not the example of the lesson, but the lesson delivery system.  I hid 5 small plastic sandwich boxes around Enochs High School. Box #1 contained the lesson, the rest of the boxes each contained copies of one of the 4 stanzas of Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."  Here's the lesson:  Find the rest of the boxes (4), and take a 1 copy of the the contents.  After finding all of the boxes and retrieving the copies, arrange the copies in the correct order to reveal the poem.  Name the author, the title, and the rhyme scheme used.

To start the process all I did was hand my students a piece of paper with the coordinates of the five boxes, marking Box #1.  As a teacher of 8th graders --or any other grade for that matter-- you do not need a GPS unit in every hand.  As a matter of fact, finding caches is easier when you have a little help.  So I recommend that you set up teams of a least 2 but not more the 4 students.  This way you can give everyone on the team a job, and the difficulty of finding the caches is reduced by the number of eyes doing the searching.

The second standard I chose to illustrate with GPS units was Algebra.I, generally taught in 8th grade as well.  We used the GPS units to measure the polar circumference on the earth.  We started in an open area, the large high school parking lot, took a reading on the GPS unit by creating a map point so that we could measure distance.  The we walked about 40 meters north and created a second map point.  Then we measured the distance between the two points and applied that information to a formula.

We wrestled with the math.  I am not a math teacher and it has been decades since I tackled algebraic equations, I also have a learning disability to slows and makes my computational skills more error prone.  So  leaned heavily on my students who were math teachers.  We finally got an answer that seemed appropriate to the data we collected by walking, but the answer was off by a factor of 4.

The upshot is, GPS is something I have adopted as an education appropriate technology because I found ways in which it can be used to employ teaching techniques unusual in most English and math curricula.  I got my students, who were attending a technology conference, out of the classroom and into the open air.  We walked around (I covered 5 miles that day tracking 5 or 6 groups of people traversing in the school grounds); we used our bodies and our minds to meet the goals of the lessons.

If you're interested in learning more about GPS in education I have created wikispace web page with a ton of links and some lessons.  The lessons include the circumference of the earth excercise.
http://educache.wikispaces.com/

Best,
Daniel


Flag as inappropriate

No comments have been left for this entry.

Leave a comment
This K12HSN blog does not allow anonymous comments.

• To leave a comment, please log in to K12HSN Blogs.
• Don't have a K12HSN account? Sign up here.