So I first heard about GooseChase on some of the blogs I read, but I was super excited when my colleague Sarah used it so I could pick her brain in person about exactly how it works. Basically GooseChase is a digital scavenger hunt, where teams photograph the items they find with an iPad. The teacher gives everyone a series of missions, which teams have to go out and find and photograph. I decided to make all my missions adjectives, and students had to look through my collection of French books to find something that looked like the adjective. Here’s what the missions look like:
Students formed teams of 4 or 5 (the free version of GooseChase only allows for 5 teams – make sure you get an educator account, or you can only have 3 teams). You as the teacher need to name the teams ahead of time, and then each team will login with one iPad (with the GooseChase app) and randomly be assigned a team. Then they were set off to look through the books and work on the missions.
As the students complete the missions, they pop up on my activity feed. If for some reason I don’t like one, I can delete it, and if I really like one, I can award it bonus points.
At the end of class, we took a few minutes to go through the activity feed and decide if we agreed with each submission. I guess my one complaint about GooseChase, is that if a team used an iPad that had been used in a previous class, they had to go in and delete all their submissions before they could begin. It doesn’t seem to clear. Does anyone else use GooseChase and know a fix for this?
I used this activity the day before April break, and I think it worked well for that. It was high energy, students were out of their seats collaborating, but it also wasn’t something that students who left early for break will be behind from missing.
Have you ever used GooseChase? What are your thoughts?
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