As part of our scholarly inquiry activity in technology class, Paul created a virtual amazing race challenge for our class. We competed as teams of 4-5 against other classmates to complete various search inquiries and virtual/ in person activities.
Was it engaging?
Overall, I found the activity to be very engaging and fun; however, I could tell it wasn't for some of my other classmates.
Certain tasks and activities were more engaging and fun in comparison to others.
Activities I found engaging:
Activities I didn't find engaging:
The activities I didn't find engaging were ones that I felt was not relevant or applicable. Perhaps if the activities created for each search were directly corresponding, it would had been more interesting.
Perhaps by creating searches, activities that's directly relevant to our learnings such as KSA, Program of Studies might had improve engagement of the reluctant students who was not engaged as they do not see the value in the activities. This is because, I feel students (my peers) at this stage in our education career want to get the most out of the time in the class to learn to become an effective teacher. However, the designed searches and activities could work great with High School or Junior High students to provide a break from the norm.
Was it meaningful?
Personally, I really enjoyed the activity and found it meaningful as an exercise that I would love to use in my own class to explore digital searches.
Did you use online tools that you had not used before?
As we weren't allowed to use Google Maps, I had to default to using other Map tools such as Yahoo Map and Bing Map which I haven't used before. I also used certain tools such as AskJeeves that I haven't used in a long time.
Experience creating my own version of the Amazing Race:
I didn't realize how difficult it was to create this activity for students, until I start to create one myself, which you can find here:
Challenges:
Was it engaging?
Overall, I found the activity to be very engaging and fun; however, I could tell it wasn't for some of my other classmates.
Certain tasks and activities were more engaging and fun in comparison to others.
Activities I found engaging:
- Using Google Earth View to capture pictures of Google Front door
- Searching for itinerary from Turkey to Google headquarter
- Meal planning
- Tetris (If only our team had the chance to get to that round. :( )
Activities I didn't find engaging:
- Cup stacking
- Response speed game
The activities I didn't find engaging were ones that I felt was not relevant or applicable. Perhaps if the activities created for each search were directly corresponding, it would had been more interesting.
Perhaps by creating searches, activities that's directly relevant to our learnings such as KSA, Program of Studies might had improve engagement of the reluctant students who was not engaged as they do not see the value in the activities. This is because, I feel students (my peers) at this stage in our education career want to get the most out of the time in the class to learn to become an effective teacher. However, the designed searches and activities could work great with High School or Junior High students to provide a break from the norm.
Was it meaningful?
Personally, I really enjoyed the activity and found it meaningful as an exercise that I would love to use in my own class to explore digital searches.
Did you use online tools that you had not used before?
As we weren't allowed to use Google Maps, I had to default to using other Map tools such as Yahoo Map and Bing Map which I haven't used before. I also used certain tools such as AskJeeves that I haven't used in a long time.
Experience creating my own version of the Amazing Race:
I didn't realize how difficult it was to create this activity for students, until I start to create one myself, which you can find here:
Challenges:
- Creating this lesson, I found it challenging to have to work backwards in my planning. First knowing that the activity I want to do with the students is an Amazing Race Challenge then searching for outcomes that will satisfy the activity was challenging.
- As the requirement for the assignment was that it need to be across curricular, I found it difficult having to cross reference multiple programs of studies to identify outcomes that will match the activity.