Author: Thomas Roche
Origin:IRELAND
Implemented in: Slovenia and Portugal
The overall aim of the GP is to use the local environments as outdoor laboratories for the teaching and learning of Environmental Science by using innovative teaching such as a GPS, which allows an interactive collaborative approach. The students are asked to capture data outdoors using a GPS and bring them to the classroom. This initiates the investigation and further observation, examination, predicting, metering, debating, collaborating, concluding and recording on concepts of latitude and longitude, time, speed and distance. The portfolios of personalized maps are exchanged, compared and contrasted, and the conclusions of these activities are packaged, presented and communicated to the school community.
Success stories
The teachers who implemented this GP generally gave good feedback and reported increased interest from all students; the biggest challenge in this case is having enough GPS available for the students to be able to make their measurements. However, few students would think that a GPS could be used as a tool at school. For this reason, as the students could relate to the GPS as a tool that is used in their surrounding in everyday life, their motivation in being able to use this tool at school and to make calculations with it themselves was clearly higher.
