Fiiiiiieeeelllld Tripping!

While nothing takes the place of real-life experiences, in education, we’ve tried to figure out ways to give our students’ more of the “outside world” within the walls of our classrooms. With the current state of technology and access to 1:1 iPads, many more options have become available to us and to our students.

In her Human Geography class, Ms. +Denise Chapman wanted her students to learn more about global cultures through the holiday of Christmas. At this time of year, the +Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago offers a “Christmas Around the World and Holidays of Light” exhibit. As such, Ms. Chapman used their online resources to create an engaging, high-interest virtual field trip for her students.

So what did the class look like?

Ms. Chapman set the tone for the lesson before class had even begun by playing a variety of Christmas songs as the students entered the room. Once class officially began, Ms. Chapman led her students in an exciting game of +Kahoot! (GetKahoot.com) to access their prior knowledge and to get them thinking about the history of the Christmas holiday around the world and how it looked in different cultures.

After the Kahoot winner was declared, Ms. Chapman asked her students, who were arranged in cooperative learning groups, to open a guiding document in Notability . This document had three parts that the students were to complete together.

The first part of the document specifically highlighted the countries of Bolivia, France, and Japan and asked the students to look for evidence of cultural norms, examples of material culture, etc. To help guide her students in answering the questions, Ms. Chapman created this visually-appealing Google Site. For the second part of the document, the students were directed to the Museum’s exhibit website to investigate how the various countries gave season’s greetings in their native language and allowed the students to preview all of the available options on the Museum’s website.

From there, the third part of the document was all about student exploration. From the dozens of country choices available, the cooperative groups were to pick three to highlight with the following information:

While the students were interested in the lesson up to this point, at this part of the activity, their conversations really stepped up to some higher level thinking skills. The groups began to make comparisons of countries with which they were familiar and those that they weren’t as much. They tied together how places that spoke similar languages had similar traditions, but not exclusively. While Ms. Chapman had asked her students to search for an informational image, a number of students used it as an opportunity to google more information on those countries’ Christmas traditions...just because they thought it was interesting!

Students working collaboratively on their virtual field trip

When the students were done researching their three different countries, Ms. Chapman asked them to pick one picture that they found to be most interesting and post it in a media album on +Schoology. The students were charged with writing captions about what the photo reflected and what they had learned about Christmas traditions in that culture as it related to their Human Geography knowledge. The class then looked through the pictures and had conversations about what they had learned. The students demonstrated that they were able to reflect on their own traditions and compare them to others while using their academic language.

Throughout the lesson, the students were highly-engaged, they were offered choice, and they truly were interested in what they were learning. Would it have been amazing for the students to actually be in the museum taking in the sights and sounds? Sure. Is that always a feasible option? No. Fortunately, with teachers like Ms. Chapman, we can still provide our students with amazing experiences without leaving the classroom.

Interested in learning more about virtual field trips? Check out some of these great ideas:

• 5 BEST Virtual Field Trips
• Get Outta Class with Virtual Field Trips
• Virtual Field Trips Every Teacher Ought to Know About
• Creating Virtual Tours in Google Earth

Have you gone on a virtual field trip with your students? Please share your ideas in the comments section so we can all learn from each other!

Interested in taking a virtual field trip and want to bounce around some ideas, learn some new tech, or just get a little support? Talk to Ms. +Dawn Bodden or one of your DTCs!