Virtual Field Trips and Some Other Things

Tracy (my teaching partner this year) and I decided to do "Travel Tuesdays" and take kids on virtual field trips each week. I tweeted about this and several teachers asked for more information. Basically, what we are going to do is find live or

recorded virtual field trips to share with our kids. To make it a shared experience we will have students log into our live Meet then I will present my screen and share the field trip. That way students can comment in the chat to ask questions. We can share what we learned afterward. Then students will blog about what they learned. This addresses social studies, science, and writing standards. 

This Tuesday we are going to Mystery Doug's house. We will be selecting a California State Park field trip (they are doing them live for different grade levels each day). These are limited to 500 participants a day for each grade level band and they are only allowing you to sign up for one field trip at the moment. Their field trip calendar can be found at ports.parks.ca.gov. Discovery Learning has a number of great virtual field trips that you can access and share with your class. There is a long list of virtual field trips on YouTube as well. Some of these are 2 - 15 minutes long while others are 30 - 60 minutes in length. 

We will be accessing Discovery Learning's aeronautics field trip and then pulling in VR/AR experiences with JigSpace/JigSpace Workshop  (these are free!) to build on what we have learned about space. If you have not accessed the JFK Moonshot app that the JFK Library shared last summer you may want to use that as well. It walks you through the moonshot voyage in "live" time using AR and actual news and NASA footage. 

Additionally, there are a number of live cams and VR experiences you can access where you visit zoos, aquariums, and museums. Broadway HD has a subscription service with a 7-day free trial where you can view a recording of a live Broadway play. There are several for kids. We may "take our kids" to see Peter Pan or The Prince and the Pauper. There are a number of plays that have been shared on YouTube as well. 

Some other things...

We have also been asking kids for their favorite songs to add to a Spotify playlist. We are going to host a virtual dance party with all of their favorite songs. This is going to take more parent help though so it is something we will be doing after spring break.

While students have school-issued Chromebooks, at home, many parents have smartphones or tablets. They may be willing to download Chatterpix and/or My Talking Pet (both are free in Apple and Google Play; thank you, Maria, for finding the Talking Pet app) so students can share their work in different formats. 

Flipgrid now allows screencasting so in addition to you creating screencasts for lessons students can screencast to show and explain their learning when on other websites. Screencastify allows you to have 5 minutes of free recording at a time. You can trim the beginning and/or end of the videos, you can pause while recording, write on your screen, and share directly to Google Classroom. You can pay for upgraded editing tools if you wish. A teacher at another site in my district researched a number of screencasting tools and said that Loom is great too. I looked into it and it is awesome! They are giving teachers a pro account for free. You can write in the video, trim the start and end and even in the middle! 

We will continue to share things as we find them or think they may be useful. If you find a tool or site you want to share please pass it along and we can share it with the grade level.