About a week ago, I purchased one of these babies. That's a Garmin Foretrex 101 wrist-mounted GPS receiver, my friends. Accuracy within 15 meters. 500 waypoint storage capacity. 12-channel receiver with WAAS. Built in celestial tables. What does all this stuff mean? I'm not exactly sure about most of it. What I do know, though, is that it is awesome and I love it.
So what would possess me to purchase such a thing? An Internet-based hobby, of course. Geocaching is an activity which combines the goofiness of the Internet with the ruggedness of nature with the wonder of technology. People hide things in the woods, or in a park, or in a cemetery, or in any other public place, and provide the latitude and longitude for the hide on the website. People like me punch the coordinates on our fancy little GPS receivers, hop in our vehicles, drive out to the spots, and find the "treasures." Sure, it's pointless. But it's a lot of fun, and I've met a lot of really interesting people through it.
What does this have to do with technology in the classroom? Well, as far as English goes, nothing. But these devices (and, in some case, this activity of Geocaching in particular) have been used in other types of classrooms (gym, math, science, etc.) throughout the nation. Do a Google search on "Geocaching in the classroom" and just take a look at what comes up. Here's one blog post I found particularly interesting: The Savvy Technologist -- Geocaching Comes to the Classroom.
I just wanted a forum to brag about my new toy. I haven't had much of a chance to use it since I bought it, but I did go out last Thursday night and, using the very fancy backlight feature on the high-resolution screen, found a couple geocaches in McGraw and Blodgett Mills. Technology is wonderful!
5 comments:
As you may or may not know, Cortland has a GIS major, that's Geographic Information Systems. They use this technology all the time.
We also talk about the "geo-tagged" web, that is websites tagged with geographic coordinates. I have suggested in the past that this opens up a new regime of topography: that is, writing about place.
Imagine this not-so-distant English project: a history of your town. Geo-tag your collection of audio, video, text, and image. As you walk about the town, your GPS links you to information--current and historical--specific to your location.
You know the old joke about locals who give you directions like "turn right where Jeb's barn used to be before it burned down"? Now you could actually use that information.
Of course if you have GPS, you probably won't need to ask for directions anyway...
Thanks for bringing it back to English for me. That's why we keep you around. :)
Dave,
You may be interested in my podcast interview with Sonny Portacio on the topic of podcasting from last July's NECC. You'll find it at http://technosavvy.org/?p=424
-Tim
Thanks, Tim! I will take a listen!
Dave, this is a very "now" little device. Like Alex, I immediately reacted to your saying it had nothing to do with English. I thought of a half dozen cool assignments you could do....well, that's no surprise to you....including the topography project Alex suggests. Thanks for sharing your new toy.
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