I love Google Earth. I am on it pretty much every day. You can go anywhere. If I am going on vacation, I use Google Earth to check out the area before renting. Students generally enjoy Google Earth as well, especially if they have been shown how powerful it is. They can go anywhere!
Virtual Field Trips can be done any number of ways. With the collaborative tools available to today’s teachers, the sky is the limit.
- Self directed. Hand out virtual field trip forms. Make sure the trip meets the learning objectives for the day, and let them pick the place. I generally constructed my own virtual field trip response forms. Questions ranged from fact gathering, to analysis, to synthesizing information into Dinah Zike’s foldables, or doing a brief presentation.
- Collaborative. I never got to do this, but would really enjoy giving it a try…. Have classes pair up with a class in another state (even better…another country) and research common learning objectives. We are really missing out on a golden opportunity for students to meet students from other places. Time zones can be a limiting factor, but where there is a will…there is a way. Imagine students from Tennessee presenting information about temperate rain forests to students who live in the Negev in Israel. Then, imagine those same Israeli students presenting information about desert ecosystems to our students in Tennessee. Imagine collaborating with a class in Fairbanks, Alaska, about the weather and water cycle…and getting weather reports and data collected by students there during winter. The opportunities are endless, and we don’t do enough of it.
- Site directed. For example, students could go to a Civil War battlefield with a live feed either through FaceTime or Zoom. A teacher would just have to find someone at that battlefield to walk their students through the area. Imagine needing to talk about rain forests, and finding someone in Costa Rica who could walk your class through those cloud forests on a livestream. Site directed means the person on the other end of the field trip runs the trip.
I am a believer that experiences provide hooks(think like a place where we hang our coats) in our minds to store vast amounts of information. For example, if I ask you about a particular vacation(the hook). You will remember the place, but on that vacation “hook” you will find literally thousands of memories and countless pieces of information. That information is what provides us with the ability to group that information into dozens of different categories. The more experiences a person has, the more powerful that learning engine becomes and the more hook organizer that we have in our brains. Virtual Field Trips provide excellent opportunities to broaden student understanding on levels which far exceed any state curriculum.
Pro Tip: If the learning objective for the day was about deserts, I would often let my students find a desert on Google Earth. They were in charge of finding as much information as they could about that area just by zooming-in for starters. If they were really interested, they were certainly welcome to use other informational resources. I would often have a virtual field trip form already posted online(Canvas) or just a paper copy. Students would later be asked to provide a quick presentation about their findings, and that is a great way to have students “publish” their work. One neat thing is to have students notice if there are patterns on Planet Earth in regards to what latitude many deserts are found. Once students begin to recognize patterns, that skill translates all subject areas. Math, Literacy, Science, and Social Studies all are full of patterns. A lot of human thinking is based upon recognizing patterns, learning how those patterns work, and then replicating those patterns in daily life.
