Category: Kids and Learning

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Placing our first Geocache

A while back, I went geocaching with my daughter Kate.  We spent quite a while hunting for an elusive cache not far from where we live but we thoroughly enjoyed the experience of being outdoors in the sunshine, using GPS technology to have a bit of real world fun. In fact we enjoyed it so much that after we signed the cache’s logbook and returned to the car to drive home, Kate asked if we could place our own cache some time for other people to find.

What a great idea.  I’ve been wanting to place a cache of my own for a while, but Katie was the impetus I needed to actually do it.  So, no time like the present, we took a detour on the way home and went via the local Dollar Store, picked out a suitable plastic container, a handful of inexpensive trinkets to include inside it, and a small notebook to use as the logbook… all this for less that $20 (and it could have been much less if we weren’t being extravagant with the trinkets)

We went home, printed out the official geocaching note to include in the cache, and packed it all into the box.  Now it was just a matter of finding a good place to stash it.

I had an inclination to stash the cache in a nearby park, somewhere I could keep an eye on it, but a few walks through the park didn’t turn up any really good hiding places.  Consequently, the cache sat on my shelf at home for several months while I got distracted by other things.

However, today was such a nice day that we decided to finally go hide the cache. After a last minute spray with some green paint (didn’t want to make it too easy to find!) we went to a lovely little park near our old house, in fact the same park where I used to play as a kid.  Sure enough, with a bit of hunting we found a perfect spot to hide it… not so obvious that it would be found by passers by, but not so impossible that a keen geocacher couldn’t find it.  We called our cache “Childhood Memories”… if you’re ever in the area, see if you can find it!

There is a real sense of fun and adventure when you go geocaching.  Making our own caused us to think hard about the placement of the box, where would be a good spot, how to find the right balance between making it too hard and too easy, not to mention the physical act of actually getting to the place where we hid it.  It was good fun…  here is a short video I shot on my phone just after we placed it.

I’m really pleased that Katie has taken on the role of being my geocaching buddy.  On the way home we had to drive past another cache, so we decided to stop and have a quick look for it.  Although I had my regular GPS with me (a Garmin GPS V) I thought I’d try finding this cache using only my new Nokia 95 phone’s built-in GPS.  I was a little doubtful that the GPS in a phone would be good enough for this sort of thing, but I was running Geocache Navigator and wanted to try it out.  As it turns out, it was spot on, and I mean exactly spot on.  A very impressive mobile app, and super easy to use.

If you haven’t tried geocaching yet, give it a go.  I can see it being a great activity for kids, as evidenced by Kate’s enthusiasm for it.  It manages to combine a bit of technology use, some outdoor adventure, resourcefulness and higher order thinking skills, physical fitness and just generally having some fun.

Having my own daughter as a geocaching buddy makes it even more special.

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I just want to (edu)Blog!

I really like Edublogs.  James is a great guy, and the service he has put together is pretty awesome most of the time.  So awesome in fact that I recommend it highly to any teachers who want to try blogging with their students.  It has all the cool features, plugins and themes, as well as just being a really good blogging service.

When it works.

Just lately, Edublogs seems to have been plagued with problems, with the recent need for multiple password resets, general system slowness and, today, a period of maintenance that saw it become unavailable for over an hour.  Normally, I wouldn’t complain… after all it’s a free service and I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, but it went down smack in the middle of a Year 4 class that were finally looking forward to blogging after spending the last few periods trying to recover from those random password resets!  Last lesson we finally got all the kids logged in with new passwords, got them to change their passwords to something they could remember, even wrote their passwords down so they wouldn’t forget them… and then today we find that half of them had their passwords reset again (!)

During the lesson the whole system then became unavailable and was supposed to be back online “very very soon”.  I’m not sure what that translates to in minutes, but it went way beyond the end of our classtime.  Now the kids don’t have another class till next week and we are nearly at the end of term and they have a major blogging project to try and complete.  Very frustrating!

I’m sure we’ll manage, and I’m sure there are people in the world with much bigger problems than having their blog provider be out of action for an hour or so, but still, in a school where I’m trying to win people over to technology – especially web 2.0 technology – it’s pretty frustrating when the same class seems to get hit with access issues over and over.

Please Edublogs!  I love ya, but can I have my reliability back!

BTW, here are some comments from the Year 4 students… they are just as frustrated and can’t understand why they seem to have problems every single time they attempt to blog.

edublogs_feedback

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Why is exceptional work treated as such an exception?

My daughter Kate, of whom I am incredibly proud, took part this morning in the 2008 Tournament of Minds. She was part of her school’s entry into the annual event, which is run as an activity for the kids in the school’s gifted and talented program.

The performance by the students was quite amazing.  For those of you unfamiliar with the Tournament of Minds event, the students are given a scenario to which they must respond.  This response is typically done in the form of a dramatic stageplay, but getting to the point of performing that stage play requires a huge amount of cross curricula learning to take place.  There is lots of behind the scenes research, teamwork, collaboration, literacy and creativity.  Teams must write, direct and produce the act, create all the props, and meet strict guidelines as to allowed times, materials and so on.

The scenario this year was that a famous author (chosen from a list of possible authors) had lost their memory. To try and reinstate the author’s memory they had to be visited by at least 5 of their more memorable characters.  Kate’s group chose Shakespeare.  So in the video below, you’ll see an amnesic William Shakespeare visited by Romeo and Juliet, Puck, Hamlet, Macbeth and Helena, who all do their best to bring back the Bard’s memory of himself and his work.

Here’s the video of the piece…  it’s about 8 minutes and the sound is sometimes a little soft, but is, I think, worth watching.

I think you’ll agree that the performance done by the students was clever, funny, insightful and creative.

These are students in Years 7 to 9 (ages 12 to 15) and what impresses me most is the fact that the study of Shakespeare does not typically take place in these years.  So, apart from a basic cursory knowledge of Shakespeare, these students pieced together this play, taking excerpts from a number of different plays and characters and combining them into a collective piece that I think works very well.  Not only that, they have managed to string the rest of it together with original writing and dialog that is inventive, rhyming, poetic and witty, and completely in keeping with the sorts of language that Shakepeare himself might have used.  The students had several meetings in school time, and also self-organised a Saturday to get together and watch some Shakespeare videos so they understood a little more about the characters and themes they ought to be tapping into.

Add to that the way they have written, memorised and performed the final piece, and I think you’d have to agree that it’s a pretty exceptional piece of work.  (And I say that not just because my daughter was in it… but she was the one playing Romeo in case you were wondering.)

But here’s the real question… why is this sort of thing the exception, and not the rule? Why do these sorts of activities only seem to exist in schools in the form of programs that take kids away from “normal lessons” so they can participate?  Surely, the sorts of skills and learning that take place in these kinds of activities are valuable on so many fronts that EVERY student could benefit from them, not just the so-called elite few that get chosen for gifted and talented programs?  While a handful of kids are withdrawn from regular classes to do things that are genuinely rich, cross-curricula, multi-literate learning experiences, the majority of kids stay in class and get bored to tears with textbooks and worksheets and subject-based teaching.  Where is the logic here?

If you look at all the truly great things that schools do with kids, so many of them are run outside the realm of regular “school”.  The things we do in “class” are so often the mundane, predictable and regimented stuff.  The really interesting stuff, the stuff that kids look back on and remember, the stuff that often defines who kids grow into in later life, is all this “other” stuff that is too often classed as “extra curricula”.  Dramatic performances, musicals, sporting events, art shows, fundraising events, computer programming competitions, online collaborative projects, and so on… why do schools consistently manage to treat the really interesting stuff as the added extras, rather than accepting that this is where so much of the truly valuable learning takes place.

The term “extra curricula” translates literally as “beyond school”.  How come our kids manage to do such amazingly great things, not because of school, but in spite of it?

When will we rethink school so that exceptional work stops being the exception, and instead become the rule?