Improve Your On-Line Course With A Virtual Field trip

by Evelyn Beck

To celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the Wright brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C., the Franklin Institute used its museum website to help high school students discover the thrill of science and engineering. As part of a competition, students studied historical weather patterns for the area, learned the 12 different steps involved in forecasting, and then predicted the weather for the Dec. 17 anniversary. What that activity did-and what the best educational websites do-is involve students in a way that helps them become producers of knowledge. “We gave them pictures of the Wright Brothers’ artifacts, but that’s not enough to make it their own,” says Karen Elinich, director of educational technology programs for the museum, which is located in Philadelphia. “The ability to reflect, embrace and then produce something is the key to remembering.”

Finding such sites is a challenge, but putting them to good use is even more demanding. Here are some destinations that might make for good virtual field trips for the creative instructor:

Geology field trips at http://www.uh.edu/~jbutler/anon/gpvirtual.html take visitors everywhere from the Stone Forest in China’s Yunnan Province to the Pleistocene period on Edisto Beach, South Carolina. You can find out how to screen for fossils, learn such Icelandic words as foss (waterfall), and take a fly-by over three-dimensional Alaskan glaciers.

The Tempe, Arizona, Police Department Crime Unit at http://www.tempe.gov/cau/default.asp offers information about crime analysis, as well as crime statistics and trends. Michael Turturice, who teaches a criminal justice class at Tempe’s McClintock High School, sends students to this site for information about crime in their own neighborhoods. (More innovative ideas from Turturice can be found at http://www.caryacademy.org/historytech/Vol1no1/virtualfieldtripspage1.htm

Multiple historic points of view related to the Civil War’s Battle of Antietam can be contrasted at . These include visuals (photographs of the battlefield and monuments), eyewitness accounts, timelines, and military analysis. High school social studies teacher Kelly Fortner uses this and related sites to push students toward narrative and analytical projects. (See more of her ideas at http://www.lessonplanspage.com/SSCICivilWarVirtualFieldTripPlusHyperStudioPres59.htm

An online tour of The Holocaust Museum at http://www.ushmm.org/allows visitors to move and examine artifacts, much as an on-site visitor might do. For example, if you choose to follow the links related to Suse Grunbaum, you’ll see a photo of the cookbook she kept as a safer alternative to a diary and a photo of her in front of the hiding place under the floorboards of a barn where she and her family stayed for two years.

The Mount Vernon tour at http://www.mountvernon.org/mtour/one.asptakes visitors through George Washington’s mansion in a systematic manner-from floor plans to individual rooms to individual objects in each room. Accompanying each object is an explanation, often a quotation from Washington himself. This tour could work for an exercise in place description in a composition class or as a complement to classes in architecture or American history.

The National Women’s History Museum at http://www.nmwh.org/exhibits/intro.htmlis helpful for visual reinforcement when my American literature students read the Declaration of Sentiments. They can examine gold suffrage ribbons and suffrage playing cards (featuring a blindfolded American goddess of justice), and they can also test their knowledge about the early women’s movement with a short quiz that asks such questions as “Why were some suffragists jailed?” Answer: for picketing the White House.

Sites with frequently updated data are among the most fun. For example, an astronomy instructor might like to have students check their inspection of the night sky by visiting the Worchester, Massachusetts EcoTarium’s virtual planetarium at http://www.ecotarium.org/dynamic/starchart/,which charts each night’s visible stars and planets.

The Exploratorium at http://www.exploratorium.edu/ is a treat of a different sort. You can learn about step dancing by moving different steps into a sequence of your choice and then viewing the resulting video. You can see how the hunting bow transformed-re-enacted before your eyes-into a Brazilian musical instrument called the berimbau. And you can learn how to forecast surfing conditions at the beach.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum is a great resource for lesson plans that use music. At http://www.rockhall.com/programs/plans.aspare ideas for using rock to teach economics, history, critical thinking, literary analysis, composition-and even music.

For a good starting point, check out http://vlmp.museophile.com/, with links to hundreds of online museums from around the globe.