Virtual field trips are an excellent way to bring art, history, and science alive to our students. It’s one thing to read about Greece on the page, or view pictures in your textbook. It’s another to be able to move around, looking up, looking down… I recently took a field trip to Egypt, thanks to Google’s support of seeing landmarks around the world from street view. It was incredible to see the difference one of the ancient wonders of the world and the humans standing beside them. I could easily picture this projected onto an interactive whiteboard, creating even more of an immersive effect for second graders as they study the impacts of ancient civilizations (Social Studies SOL 2.1). These field trips also work well on tablets and iPhones, where you can pinch to zoom in and zoom out. Scan the QR code to the left to adventure on your own explorations of Giza.
Of course, virtual field trips aren’t the only tool that merges technology and reality to bring deeper learning to life. Augmented reality is one of my personal favorites, largely due how widely applicable it is in the school environment. Our preschool and kindergarten students can use augmented reality to support their early literacy as they explore alphabet cards or books that connect to 3-D images of items that represent each letter’s sound. Elementary students can explore habitats, scanning images and seeing the animals pop-up around them, much like Pokemon Go! characters. And I’ve even seen older students using augmented reality to do dissections or explore the inside of human bodies! Within the school library, one of our roles is to create connections to students’ curriculum, while encouraging students to think, create, share, and grow. Augmented reality offers a pathway for using some of the more specialized tools that a school library may have to enrich the curriculum while encouraging exploration, inquiry, and collaboration between students. There is something still quite magical about virtual and augmented reality for even our most tech-saavy students — and that magic helps cement that life-long love of learning.
Featured Image Credit:
Pexels. (2016, November 19). Camel-desert-pyramids-egypt-person-1839616 [Photograph] Pixabay. https://pixabay.com/photos/camel-desert-pyramids-egypt-person-1839616/
As always, Audra, I love your enthusiasm. I’m really curious to know if and how you’ve actually implemented any of these with younger students. I can see so many applications for secondary schools. The technology itself is also a concern. (Though I believe you said that your district as been 1-to-1 for a while now?)
Yes, I have used both virtual field trips and augmented reality with young students! We use Google Expeditions integrated with NearPod to create interactive virtual field trips. NearPod makes it a little bit easier to navigate for them and integrates really well. They were able to look around under the ocean, see coral reef and tropical fish, watch sharks… I combined it with YouTube video in that NearPod.
With augmented reality, we have mostly done things with letters or picture books that let you hold the iPad up to it. Some of my students are already familiar with the technology because there are games featuring characters from PJ Masks and similar shows that use it as well.