Great Resource for Teamwork and a Fun Activity for Students!

This is a fun app to use to promote movement and fun outside of school and during school in times such as field trips. While this might not be every teacher's favorite idea, I think it is important to promote students to be creative and want to get students to know what they are doing outside of school.

Goosechase is an amazing app that can increase student engagement and enhance learning. This tool helps takes the traditional scavenger hunt to a new level. The tool can be used to enhance field trips by allowing students to synthesize powerful learning connections and showing what they learning. It can also be used for collaboration when students are put into groups. I love that it allows for a variety of different missions (tasks) that can be graded directly such as text based questions but allows for pictures and video missions to be submitted as well. Overall it is an effective teaching tool that can be used with minimal set up for students. Students must have access to a mobile device such as an iPad or phone with wireless access. At this time, it does not interface with computers in terms of completing an active Goosechase though. The teacher dashboard allows for real time view and submissions are easily viewed. If a submission is inappropriate or not pertinent to the mission, it can be deleted requiring the team to re-submit the mission. The leaderboard is also visible to both the teams and the teacher. Bonus points can be added to a submission as well deleting points for a submission. It is important that students are trained to read the notifications so teachers can communicate with teams during the active Goosechase. Students must create an account which can be challenging for students under Age 13 due to the terms of service. The terms of service should be read completely to ensure compliance. The terms allow for the creation of accounts for students under age 13 under certain circumstances. Overall this tool provides amazing potential for blending scavenger hunts with content standards when structured correctly. Students find the activities engaging. The strength of the Goosechase instructionally lies in the teacher creating well structured missions that clearly meet the learning standards and objectives. It is important to always check the quality of submission and ensure that students understand that what they submit should be appropriate and pertinent to the mission that they were asked to complete. The free version is fine for getting started. If the need to have more teams and more games occur, I do recommend paying for the upgrade to the Educators Plus license. The success of this tool is directly related to how educators structure the Gooschase. Overall, I would recommend it for any classroom where wireless mobile devices are available. The app is in both the Apple Store and the Play store.