Scavenger Hunt

The week of October 14, 2012, our class participated in a scavenger hunt. This scavenger hunt was designed to integrate many of the technology tools that we have learned thus far in the classroom. My group had the shapes scavenger hunt. We were to find and capture a picture of ten of the items listed on our scavenger hunt. After capturing the images using a digital camera, we had to upload the photos to our computers. We used a flash drive to transfer the images and then stored them in Dropbox. Our next task was to resize the files to a smaller image and change the resolution to 72. After doing this, we renamed our files and uploaded them to both Picassa and Google Presentation. The final step was posting these to our website.

This activity incorporated multiple ways to use technology. We used a digital camera, flash drive and web tools to complete this project. In writing it seems like we had a lot to do, but doing the actual activity was smooth and flowed well into the overall content of the course. Getting out of the classroom and being able to take pictures in a natural environment was interactive and exciting; an better alternative to simply finding pictures on the web. I had not previously used Picassa, so it was new and enlightening to use for the first time.

The scavenger hunt was fun to do in TPTE 486, however, I do not think I would be able to use it in my future classroom. This activity required us to go off in groups and take pictures - something I would not be able to let my young students do. I could find an alternative and limit the children to only taking pictures of items in the classroom, but that would also limit the amount of pictures and variety of pictures that the children would be able to take.