Sunday, April 14, 2013

Blog Post #12

This is my proposal for a blog post assignment for EDM 310.


For this assignment you will have to be creative and open minded to new ways of taking field trips.

1.Visit the Education World website and write one paragraph about what you have learned about using virtual tours in the classroom. Also, find a virtual tour on the internet and write one paragraph about your experience.

2. Go to the National Museum of Natural History website and take a virtual tour of the Smithsonian Museum. When clicking on the link you will have to click on the device you are using to view the tour. Write two paragraphs about what you have learned while taking the tour and how you would  implement virtual field trips in your classroom.


My Turn:
1. After visiting the Education World website, I now understand why teachers prefer to take virtual field trips with their students. Virtual field trips can be fun for the students and teachers. I personally have never experienced a virtual field trip and I wasn't sure how it would do in a classroom. As an educator I plan to continually learn different ways to teach my students and have them explore, and virtual field trips are a great way of doing this.

As I researched and learned how many different virtual tours there are I found a website called Panoramas. This website is filled with many ideas for virtual field trips all over the world. The locations I decided to view were the seven wonders of the world. This includes the Taj Mahall in India, Great Wall of China, Colosseum in Rome, Chichen Itza in Mexico, Petra in Jordan, Machu Picchu in Peru, and Rio de Janeiro.  I was able to see these amazing locations without having to leave my living room and under each panorama is a description of the locations.

2. While taking an amazing tour in the Nation Museum of Natural History, I was overwhelmed with the number of exhibits and size of the museum. There are three floors of the museum to view and they are all different. The ground floor has Western Cultures, Soils, Orchids, Rastafarian  Coral Reef Crochet, Cyprus's, and gardens. The first floor is filled with information about creatures and their fossils. On the second floor there is a variety of insects, bones, geology, and an incredible IMAX theater.

As an educator I would use this and many other virtual tours throughout the year. Virtual tours, like at the museum, have the ability to give the students schema of history, social studies, and science. Since virtual tours are accessible from any computer with internet I would assign homework to students, have them do classwork for their assigned computers in the classroom, and have a class discussion about the location we are visiting as a class by using a SmartBoard. Virtual field trips are wonderful to implement in the classroom and I will be using this technology in my classroom.

1 comment:

  1. Katelin,
    I really enjoyed reading your blog post. I thought your ideas were very creative. I think virtual field trips are a great idea. It seems like it would be an easy way to allow your students to experience different places all over the world without ever leaving the classroom. I also think it would be great to visit the Smithsonian Museum. I definitely will keep these websites in mind when I become a teacher because I would love to incorporate virtual field trips into my classroom as well.

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