GPS and Field Experiences

On February 16th, Mark Musselman made a Global Positioning Systems (GPS) presentation to the middle school social studies teachers of Anderson School District Five at T. L. Hanna High School in Anderson, SC. The professional development workshop dealt with using GPS technology in the classroom and provided an opportunity for the teachers to become familiar with the technology. Of the 28 teachers in attendance, 25 stated that they had never used the technology.

The image shows the practice course that was set up north of T. L. Hanna High School. Teachers began at any of the stations shown in the image. There they rolled a die and loaded from a list at that station the coordinates associated with that number. A teacher then navigated to the coordinates that they loaded to the GPS unit. At the destination, another teacher repeated the process until each teacher felt comfortable with loading coordinates and navigating to a point. The campus practice course and the downtown field trip example were both set up from the Francis Beidler Forest office in Four Holes Swamp using Google Earth. Examples were also given regarding the use of GPS technology at sites such as the Francis Beidler Forest.