Distance Learning Technologies: Virtual Field Trips

Field trips – piling on to a yellow school bus, sitting not-so-quietly for the trip, wandering throughout a museum with a group of friends, eating lunch from a brown paper sack – have become increasingly rare in today’s public education. Often the funds just don’t exist for this type of experience (Lind 2009). In addition, teachers are under increasing pressure to spend as much time as possible on the skills that students will have to master for state tests, rather than “wasting” a day at a museum.  In order to bridge the gap for students who don’t get the opportunity for field trips, some teachers are turning to virtual tours instead (Zaino 2009).

Imagine hearing about two new exhibits at New York City museums that would be absolutely perfect to supplement the curriculum in the high school history course you teach. You want your students to tour the museums, interact with the curators, and participate in a group critique of a few pieces of artwork from each exhibit.

The problem?  You’re located on the west coast. What do you do? Perhaps asking students to front part of the costs would work, as would fundraisers or seeking donations from local businesses, but all of these are very time consuming, Besides, you’re not sure how many parents would let their children travel cross-country with a school group, and you want ALL of your students to experience these exhibits. Enter virtual field trips. By using web 2.0 tools like Skype, discussion boards, and media sharing sites, students can participate in rich learning experiences from their classrooms (Zaino 2009). According to Simonson et. al (2012), the cone of experience helps educators to choose the type of distance learning activity that is most effective to the circumstances: “The critical job of the educator, especially the designer of distance education materials, is to be only as realistic as needed in order for learning to effectively occur” (pg 92). In this case, an actual field trip would be an inefficient use of funds and time, while a virtual trip gives students a realistic experience of a museum visit while cutting back drastically on the cost and travel considerations involved.

In this scenario, I would suggest a combination of distance learning tools. I would start by looking for a virtual tour offered online by the museum – many prominent organizations already offer these on their websites. For example, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum  has an extensive collection of online exhibit resources, with even MORE available online than you’d see in the museum. The National Gallery of Art offers online tours of exhibits as well as what they call “in-depth study tours,” or guided virtual tours of specific artists or themes.

Screenshot of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History's virtual tour

In addition to the virtual tour, I would suggest a webconferencing  tool like Skype to connect students with a museum curator. Skype is easy to use, free of cost, and requires little in the way of special equipment (just a webcam and a high speed internet connection). Finally, in order for students to work on a group critique of  a few selected exhibit pieces, a discussion forum with capability for embedded graphics would be effective. Forums.com is an easy to use example, and many course management tools (like Moodle, for example) include discussion forums as well.

Virtual field trips have been used successfully in classrooms around the world. According to Spicer and Stratford (2001), students have very positive perceptions of virtual field trips (although students are still insistent that they should not completely replace real field trips). One science teacher at a New Jersey middle school received a local education foundation grant in order to set up a series of virtual field trips for students at her school – they’ve “measured elevations of topographical features on the moon, dissected a cow’s eye via a link to the Hands-On Museum in Ann Arbor, MI., and took a virtual tour of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY” (Manzo, 2009). Other teachers have used virtual field trips to prepare for and supplement an actual trip: one elementary classroom in Alabama met virtually with a scientist at NASA’s Mississippi Space Center, and they “studied features of space crafts and the solar system as they prepared for an actual visit to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL, later this year” (Manzo, 2009).

References

Lind, G.  2009. Cash-strapped schools cancel field trips. USA Today.

Manzo, K. (2009). Virtual Field Trips Open Doors for Multimedia Lessons. Education Week, 28(21), 9.

Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2012). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of 

      distance education (5th ed.) Boston, MA:Pearson.

Spicer, J. I., & Stratford, J. J. (2001). Student perceptions of a virtual field trip to replace a real field trip. Journal Of  

      Computer Assisted Learning, 17(4), 345-354.

Zaino, J. (2009). Field-Tripping Goes Virtual. Instructor, 119(2), 34-36.