Virtual Trip Project Page

Home | Schedules | Portfolios | Activity Structures | How To Links | Explore On Your Own

A virtual field trip is a field trip that uses the Internet instead of a bus to transport your students to an opportunity for real world learning. In fact, the Internet allows us to guide our students through places virtually that we could never visit due to cost, location, or time restraints.

According to Kawka and Burgess (2001), in their book, V-Trip Travel Guide, "a V-trip is a pre-planned visit to a specific Internet destination to accomplish specific educational objectives" (p. 2), and these trips take almost as much planning and preparation as physical field trips.

So, where do you go on V-trips? Some common trips include visits to:

• NASA's Mars exploration program (http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov),
• SeaWorld (http://www.seaworld.org),
• zoos such as The Electronic Zoo (http://netvet.wustle.edu/e-zoo.htm)
• museums, such as The Smithsonian (http://www.si.edu/) Check out the section for kids!
• Statue of Liberty (http://www.ellisisland.org )

Or find others from these sites:

The Virtual Schoolhouse http://metalab.unc.edu/cisco/schoolhouse
Teachers Helping Teachers http://rite.ed.qut.edu.au/oz-teachernet/projects/otn-projects.html

Creating A Virtual Trip

A Virtual Field Trip consists of these three pieces. Your assignment is to create the following:

• A Virtual Trip Lesson Plan-describes the activities and sequence of activities to take place, as well as the assignment students are to complete at the end of the field trip.
  
• A Study Guide-written tool that guides your students through the websites (Examples of student created study guides:
  Field Trip to the Antarctic
  Field Trip to the Ocean
• A Rubric-how will you evaluate student achievement/learning from the activity?