It’s been a busy few weeks at work lately. I have presented at 2 conferences in less than 2 weeks, helped organise a 2 day PD and worked closely with several teachers on curriculum design and some software training. So finding time to blog has been hard, although I have been trying to keep up with reading edublogs, and have bookmarked several issues to come back to later.

I suspect that the direction of my blog might change a bit next year, when I return to the classroom for the first time in 3 years. I imagine my focus will be more on what works (or doesn’t) in the classroom and less on the issues of technology in education in general.

Yesterday at the PD day I was introducing a new project to our staff. I have recently worked on a successful grant application to create a unit of work revolving around GPS and Geoaching. The substantial funding will principally be used to purchase handheld GPS devices and provide time for staff to receive training and undertake collaborative curriculum planning. So, in the introductory session, we discussed the variety of ways in which geocaching could be used to enrich the curriculum, and for teachers to have that discussion, they had to first understand what it was all about.

So, we set off to a local park to try and find a Geocache, and although we were disappointed to discover that the cache had bee removed, it was great to see the enthusiasm and excitement our little ‘field trip’ generated. I think it gave the staff a taste of the excitement it might generate in their own classes…

Our friendly chauffer

Loading the troops

Safety first

In search of treasure

Following the GPS

Searching high and low

A likely spot?

Leaving empty handed… but smiling.

We discussed how the students might design their own caches, and the clues to find them, using skills and information from various subjects.  We talked about multi-caches, virtual caches, travel bugs, muggles and triangulation.  All in all it was a great discussion, and I’m quite sure an inspiring unit of work will come from this project. It’s a shame I wont be around to see its fulfillment in this cluster of schools, but I hope to develop something similar at my new school.