Introduce your students to the world via a virtual field trip.
Virtual field trips offer computerized travel and educational extension activities without ever leaving the classroom. While actual travel may be a bit more exciting, it is not likely that a class of elementary school students will have the opportunity to visit the rain forest or go rafting along the Nile River. Virtual educational excursions also allow students to interact with students from around the world and immerse themselves in other cultures.
Low-Cost Discovery
Economically strapped school districts can still offer students a glimpse outside the region via online field trips and interactive tours. While some educational websites charge for virtual field trips, there are plenty of free online tours from educational websites. Your students can expand their learning beyond textbook units and hand-outs to a realistic travel experience. The length of the virtual field trip varies widely, and sometimes includes printable extension activities and interactive web-cam sessions.
Finding Virtual Field Trips
The Internet 4 Classrooms website is a clearinghouse resource for extension activities and boasts an extensive "Virtual FieldTrip Collection" with destinations from around the world available for multiple age levels. Field trips also include topic-based excursions and career-related tours. A teacher's guide is commonly available for review prior to the class virtual excursion. The website also offers tools for educators who would like to create their own destination or topic-specific virtual field trip.
eFieldTrips
efieldTrips allow teachers to access destination-based field trips, journey-back-into-history excursions as well as landmark legal cases and social issues discovery sessions. Students can experience a narrated tour of the Naval Historical Center on Pearl Harbor; tour Biscayne National Park, Carlsbad Caverns, the International Butterfly Park and Death Valley National Park; and virtually climb the peaks at Denali National Park.
Blackwell's Best Virtual Field Trips
Blackwell's Best Virtual Field Trips tour both destinations and museums. If a field trip to Washington D.C. had to be stripped due to budget issues, sign your class up for a virtual tour of the White House and learn about the history of the building while touring each room. You can incorporate art activities, decorate your classroom and have students dress as if they were actually going on outdoor excursions to make an online field trip seem even more exciting. The website offers outdoor investigation tours to destinations such as the Grand Canyon, Antarctica, volcano hot spots, fossil hunting locals and the rainforest.
Topic-Specific Tours
You can teach students about farming on six separate online field trips courtesy of Agriculture in the Classroom website. Students can also learn about the history of the industrial era in the United States through Factory Tours Online website. NASA Quest allows students to interact with virtual guides on a tour at NASA and learn become astronauts. The ThinkPort website focuses on specialized virtual field trips geared to math, economics, science and language arts curriculums. The CARE organizational website features 13 tours of economically distressed and war-torn areas of the world and infuses a humanitarian aspect to each tour.
Tags: field trip, virtual field, extension activities, Field Trips, field trips, National Park