How would you like to take your students to the Galapagos Islands or Costa Rica for a study on ecosystems, speciation, or the rainforests? How about a trip to NASA to watch the latest Space Shuttle launch? Have you ever dreamed of taking your science students on a trip to the Museum of Natural History, to the Smithsonian Institute, or to Disney’s Wild Kingdom? Location, lack of money, and time take away the ability for schools to take their students on field trips. New technologies allow students to explore the world without leaving the traditional classroom, and allow virtual students to do the same.
Watch the news story about virtual science field trips posted on Science Daily.
See: http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2005/1011-virtual_reality_field_trips.htm
If you do a Google search for Virtual Field Trips, you will find all sorts of sites of field trips. Here are just two I found:
http://www.internet4classrooms.com/vft.htm
http://www.virtual-field-trips.com/
Virtual field trips can use real actors visiting real places, and may be supplemented with animations, movies, and games. The students are given opportunities to learn new words and explore new environments, and if based on existing books, give students more incentive to read. Using virtual field trips also increases visual literacy, which is defined as the ability to discriminate and interpret visual actions, objects, and other images, while gaining meaning from them. The use of visuals in instructional design is almost mandatory in our culture of increasing visual orientation. When designing curriculum and delivery systems, the way students learn and the styles with which they learn must be considered. The proliferation of the new technologies available to the general public as well as students makes me wonder whether our traditional modes of instruction are keeping pace with the rapid evolution of technology. Why not use virtual field trips, especially when the alternative may be out-of-date textbooks and videos?
Another related story discusses the use of virtual labs.
See http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2007/0809-virtual_lab.htm
The story reviews a virtual reality website from the University of Virginia. Often small budget experiments and textbooks don’t allow science teachers to get their point across to the students. With a virtual reality experiment, students get to see what the words mean. Visual learners are given the chance to see concepts of science and understand them better. Virtual reality experiments can show things to students that are usually unseen, such as magnetic fields, electricity, and atomic structure.
Find the UVa website at: http://www.virlab.virginia.edu/VL/contents.htm
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As I read about the virtual field trips I thought how useful some of the resources would be for science students as many of the field trips are to places that would be unaccessible for anyone but the most advanced researchers to experience.
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