The Internet is a wonderful resource that
enables teachers to take students to places they cannot go in
person.
Organisations such as museums and art galleries set up online
exhibitions that can be easily accessed from classrooms anywhere
in the world if you have an Internet connection.
You can also make your own trips using resources available on
the Internet. |
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| Prepare for your Journey |
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| Evaluate the
Trip |
Is the Tour Better in Person?
Use Kathy Schrock’s evaluation form to assess virtual tours when they have been completed. |
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| Find Online Exhibitions and Field Trips |
| These websites provide leads to ready-made virtual exhibitions and tours for students of all ages. |
- EdNA Distributed Search
Search using the the phrase ‘virtual field trips’.
- DiscoverNet Australian Tales
Australian people, places and themes feature in these tales created by museums and galleries throughout Australia.
- WebExhibits
These exhibits are sponsored by the Institute for Dynamic Educational Advancement, which is dedicated to improving education by encouraging problem-solving and creative thought. The exhibits are produced in collaboration with numerous educational, scientific and cultural institutions.
- Virtual Field Trips
LDS Homeschooling in California website contains a comprehensive list of trips to museums, art galleries, factories, science topics, other times and places, and live webcams from throughout the world.
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| Make your own Virtual Field Trips |
A virtual field trip may be defined as: a guided and narrated tour of Web sites that have been selected by educators and arranged in a "thread" that students can follow from site to site with just the click of a single button.
Two pieces of software, TourMaker and TrackStar can be used to develop your own field trips for your students. |
- TourMaker
The virtual field trips at Tramline using the TourMaker software are designed to make the best use of the Internet in the classroom. To do this, each annotated trip that a teacher creates should be designed to take students to some of the best websites on each trip subject.
To see how it’s done take the Resource Tour for Teachers.
This explains what a virtual tour can achieve for students and shows how the final result works by using the TourMaker software to format the resource tour.
The website also includes forty trip examples that cover Science, Society and Environment and English topics for students in K-12 classrooms. Each trip includes an introduction and resources for teachers.
TourMaker is relatively inexpensive ($25.00 US for a single copy), and a trial version can be downloaded from the website.
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- TrackStar
TrackStar gives teachers another avenue to creating learning pathways designed to support a unit of learning. Each of these pathways is referred to as a ‘track’ and the format calls for a ‘track description’ followed by an annotated list of websites. Registration is free and tutorials are available to assist in producing tracks.
In order to become acquainted with the process it is possible to make practice models before committing a list to a permanent place on the TrackStar website.
Already prepared tracks may be located by keyword, author, or themes and standards. Existing tracks can be changed to customise them for individual classroom needs. In this case the existing track remains in its original form and a new track is created.
This is a useful site to aid in the development of customised topic lists of websites. It is an American site, however, so the relation to specified curriculum outcomes may differ somewhat from Australian curriculum frameworks.
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