Just How To Use Virtual Trips To Enrich Your Teaching

              

Just How To Use Virtual Trips To Enrich Your Teaching

              As I begin this post, I find myself wondering if I have any readers at all.  I have, in good faith, tried to address issues that others might find informative but that is an assumption about having an audience.  So, I am going to write this post as if someone is actually reading.  I made a second assumption too often that only a few sentences were enough to make some points for parents who were looking for advice or for teachers who were reading and searching for ideas to implement in the classroom.  Then just recently I remembered that I was told far too long ago that I make assumptions about how much detail is necessary for the average person because I learn so quickly.  So today………in this column so very specific examples about one of my favorite strategies for technology integration.  

 

             Let’s begin with the idea of a virtual trip which is the idea of going to a website and viewing videos or a webcam in place of an actual visit.  When life was much simpler, at least once a year, teachers could arrange to take their students on trips to other places. I remember taking my students to the Royal Ontario Museum to see the special exhibit at the time on Tutankhamun and the life in Ancient Egypt at the time. Junior students always studied Ancient Egypt in those days as a way of learning about ancient history and technological change.  But when we went on buses, there was a considerable cost involved in the charting the buses and arranging for a meal and ensuring a teacher had at least one adult for every ten students.  It was a lot of work, but it was sound educational pedagogy.

 

             But now, one can go onto the website for the Royal Ontario Museum and search through all the education programs and aids they have. You can look at artifacts on display in the museum and listen at the same time to narration concerning what the students are looking at.  Or you can watch a video about the life of bats to go with the Bat exhibit which students always love to visit. Or imagine if you did a search on virtual trips concerning dinosaurs because your students were interested in them or you had to include them as a unit in specific grade and you can across links to videos about dinosaurs which accompanying narration and you could stop and start the videos at any time. All you need in order to accomplish this in a class, any class, is having a cart with an LCD projector that you can hook up a laptop to and maybe speakers attached, and you are away to races by just pulling down an old-fashioned screen or projecting on a white board or even a nice long sheet of fabric or paper.  

 

             Now, instead of reading and doing research and listening to the teacher talking and showing some pictures, you can immerse them in paleolithic times and see the size and the other flora and fauna around living dinosaurs and write down all the questions the students come up with.  Instead of the lesson being teacher directed, the students have the floor and pick up on the details that THEY are interested in.  It is almost like a choose your own adventure, with the students in the lead, which means following their noses for things that impress them or challenge them or raise questions to ponder.  That is when students do their best learning.  It’s called deep learning.  

 

           When I cross paths with former students, they invariably refer back to the fun things we did as a class, but they were always things that they were involved in and with and left deep impressions in their minds.  That is the ultimate compliment. I am only jealous now that I didn’t have access to these things twenty years ago.  How much more fun I would have and how much better my lessons would have been all the time.