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January 15, 2008 09:01 PM
Qwest Grant: Mapping of the Buck Creek Cabins
The 6th Graders at Sunridge Middle School in Pendleton have been braving the rainy winter weather to begin their preparations of training to use the GPS and learning to import data on to Google Earth and Google Maps. In rotation, all nine classrooms are going through the GPS boot camp in preparation for Outdoor School at the Buck Creek Cabins in May. The students have had no complaints - even when we had a complete down pour in the middle of our geocaching activity! Boy, did they want the treasure!
The main goal of this project is to bring technology and the outdoors together. Using GPSs, digital cameras, and mapping software, the students will be adding another dimension to all they see and do while at Outdoor School. They will be recording coordinate data, species of wildlife, trails, and elevations while at the cabins. Upon return from Outdoor School they will be working together to put their collections together as a class into a collaborative multi-media mapping project.
As far as the laptops, set of GPS, and digital cameras, they have all been ordered and until they arrive, we have been content in borrowing from the UMESD!
For the immediate future, the goal is to get all the classes through the GPSs and imputing data training. I will also be working with groups of students from each classroom in the coming months on how to import photos and written reports into mapping software. We will be doing this through a smaller community mapping project of sites around our town. This way we will have experienced students in each class to be peer helpers. The 6th grade teachers are all excited to be a part of this project as well, with some of them attempting to use GPSs with their students for the first time through this project! It has been a fun process so far, and as the weather improves, it should only get better!
Posted by heidipaullus on January 15, 2008 at 09:01 PM in Ed Tech Grants | Comments (0)
