New Technology and Outdoor Learning (2 of 8): Educaching

This is the second of eight posts where I discuss some of the things that I talked about at the 2010 Learning and Teaching Scotland Outdoor learning Regional Events

Yesterday I wrote a post about geocaching. The location of geocaches in your area can be found by looking at geocaching.com and downloading the coordinates. Educaching is an evolution of the activity that contains some of the core ideas of geocaching (eg: it includes GPS).

The main difference, as I understand it, between the two activities is that geocaches tend to be quite permanent and educaches tend to be a little more temporary. Most educaches tend to be hidden for the duration of the learning activity and contain information or items help solve a problem or that are needed to progress with a task.

There are lots of examples of educaching on the Internet. But the example of learning about dinosaurs from Jen Deyenberg is the one that I have been talking about in my resent presentation.

Let me explain the process.

1) The class have been learning about dinosaurs. As part of their learning they have been finding out about Waterhouse Hawkins. Waterhouse Hawkins (8 February 1807– 27 January 1894) was a sculptor and natural history artist. He was the first person in the world to re-model dinosaur bones to create standing skeletons of dinosaurs. He is probably the most famous for recreating the 32 life-size models of dinosaurs in the Crystal Palace Park, London. So, as part of their learning they read the book with the teacher on "The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins".

2) The next learning task was for the children to go and find some educaches. The educaches had been hidden by the teacher in the school grounds and contained a variety of paper dinosaur bones.  The children had to use the GPS coordinates to find all of the hidden bones.

3) Back in the classroom the children had to put the bones together as they were all muddled up.

4) Remember the project was linked to Waterhouse Hawkins who was one of the first people to take the bones are create 3D replications of the dinosaurs. So the class then took the bones and imagines what the dinosaur would have looked like before turning it into a 3D scaled model. There was discussion about why some of the dinosaurs would not stand up and what could and could not be fossilized.

5) The class then video conferenced with another school who had completed a similar activity and were able to talk in more detail about the process of fossilization.

6) Finally the children shared their learning on their personal class blogs.

Now, what I like about this particular activity is that the teacher could have achieved the objectives of the lesson by not taking the children outside at all and also by not using the technology. But instead the lesson used a combination of books, outdoor learning, technology, 3D modeling, collaboration and sharing.

In short it was a really blended lesson involving a variety of pedagogical styles. Some of the children would have been engaged because of the book, some because they went outside, some because of the GPS, some because of the video conference and some because of the physical modeling. But, they all would have been engaged, somehow and that is what the best learning and best lessons are about.

I’ll be writing more on educaching in the future.

Comments

[Jen Deyenberg]

Fantastic write up of the learning process! It sounds so much better when someone puts it together so well!

[Alan Parkinson]

Great post: I like that idea a lot.. Could be something other than dinosaur bones of course, so adaptable to other contexts.... yoink ! ;)

[Ollie Bray]

Thanks Jen!

And.... exactly Alan - loads we could do with this!

[Jen Deyenberg]

Credit where credit is due - I should mention the original idea of dinosaur bones in caches came from http://www.educaching.com/ - a great resource if you are looking for more ideas for educaching!