Did you ever go Letter boxing or heard of Geocaching? Well this Educaching is using your GPS for educational purposes. I'd never heard of this product that was up for review by the Old Schoolhouse Crew.
We were sent free materials from Educaching in exchange for our reviews. It’s a 128 pages guide which gives you lessons and instructions to use your GPS for education.
There are five sections to this manual; teacher education, lesson plans, field sheets, acquiring GPS and beyond the basics. I spent quite a bit of time on the teacher education as this was a pretty new concept for me!
This section defines a lot of the lingo like geocaching, waypoints, educache and more. “Basically” it boils down to using Longitude and Latitute coordinates to have students find hidden things and plot certain points.
Once you figure out how that’s done which requires a little knowledge of your GPS (more on that farther down) you’re on your way to the lessons.
The lessons range from math, science, thought process and more. Ideas are also given for modifying to fit your own needs.
Honestly we don’t have time for a lot of extra things beyond what we are already studying and some of lessons the kids would all need to have studied the same things so if I were to use this I’d be modifying and making my own lessons a lot. We did find one on chemical and physical changes which we studied together last year so we decided to test that one.
You could take many of the ideas but exchange your science or history concepts but it would take more teacher preparation. Some of activities like types of triangle, finding perimeter etc… would obviously be more suited to a group of same age rather then multi-age kids. It would work very well in a class or co-op setting, even a co-op class specifically on Educaching would be a neat idea.
We did use the field sheet section to print the worksheet that went with the Chemical/Physical change lesson we chose. It basically was a fill in the blank sheet to write in the coordinates and locations as you found them along with whether they where chemical or physical changes.
For the activity you place things (or I used slips of paper naming the item) that demonstrate a chemical or physical change in container (or I used zip locks.) The book gives you the suggestions. Things like a burnt match (chemical), rusty nail (chemical) or popped balloon (physical). Then you go out with your GPS and find your place and write down the coordinates.
Though this could be a very fun activity it obviously takes a lot of teacher prep time (without kids in tow) to complete.
Well on to our experience…
My 9 year old daughter tried it out with me. I first got all the coordinates and then I gave them to her to find. This is where we started having a lot of problems.
Our GPS did not handle this very well. Apparently our GPS only does street directions and won’t go “through the woods” so to speak. By coaching her (since I knew where they were) we were able to do the exercise but it obviously wasn’t ideal and not nearly as fun as it could have been.
My recommendation is to definitely check out your GPS and know how it works. In the manual they go over what to look for in a GPS but having ours already we obviously didn’t follow these guidelines. We had problems with charging our GPS and keeping it off the charger for very long. Prior to this we only used it in the car constantly (pretty much) plugged in, so battery life is an issue.
I truly don’t know much about GPS systems but my husband though more expensive models would do the off road that ours wouldn’t.
With the frustration of our GPS aside I think this could be very useful for a homeschool family especially if you take part in co-op’s or classroom situations that could make use of it. You would also need to consider if you have the teacher prep time. One option could be to have one of your older children “plan” the event and do all the prep.
The price is very reasonable at $32 so if you've been wanting to check out this technology with your kids this might be your ticket!
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