Spotlight

Image by rmom352 via Flickr

Today was filled with unconference sessions set by request of the participants. There were 24 different sessions offered in 4 time slots. My day began with geocaching in the rain with Porter Palmer. She confessed to being new to geocaching, but has a great depth of knowledge and enthusiasm about sharing it with others. We started with a discussion of devices vs iPhone app and decided to go with the Garmin device for this morning's adventure.

Porter placed over 10 caches on this campus for participants to locate during the conference. After learning how to use the Garmin, we set off in search of the first find. There are many types of cache containers and objects to use, but she recommended using the travel bugs from geocaching.com since they offer their services for free and selling items is a source of income for them. It is nice to support this organization in this way. Containers can be the leftover container from Chinese food, to official boxes purchased online.

How would you use this in the classroom? Many ideas were shared including: following directions, scavenger hunts, informational cache, study guide questions at each station, group project at cache like math question and the answer will lead to the next clue, for smaller children you have one or two caches with prizes.

All in all it was a fun walk around this part of campus looking for caches of different types, even if there were a million steps involved!! Thanks Porter.