Destination: Virtual Fieldtrips--Using Websites for Learning

Foundation

The Web offers some wonderful sites for learning and exploration. An excellent class activity can be to take a class to the computer classroom and let them "wander" around a web site or number of web sites you have selected. Perhaps we can't hop on a jet to Paris and visit the Louve, but we can visit the Louvre's web site and see many of the same paintings. Like a real fieldtrip, a virtual fieldtrip is a chance to "go" experience and explore something.

image of Danteworlds

Virtual Fieldtrips are especially good for Literature classes. Students could visit a site or sites devoted to a particular work of literature or author and learn more about them. An excellent example of such a site is Danteworlds (http://danteworlds.lamc.utexas.edu/index2.html) on Dante's Inferno. Composition classes could visit a site related to a topic (such as this excellent one on the Holocaust Holocaust Learning Center (http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/), a site to explore a particular issue for research (such as this Frontline site on terrorism http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/network/), or a site to search for a writing topic like Human Rights Watch (http://www.hrw.org/).

The possibilities are truly endless for enriching your students access to excellent learning materials.

Practice

Since the potential uses of a virtual fieldtrip are so broad, it is hard to offer specific instructions. These general guides, however, I think will prove useful.

Suggestions for conducting a virtual fieldtrip:

• Create a fieldtrip home page that serves as an easy starting place for students. This webpage has the selected site or sites you want your students to visit. It also serves as an easy place for students to return to for more exploration. (To see an example of such a fieldtrip home page, visit this site for a fieldtrip on the holocaust http://www.accd.edu/sac/english/lirvin/1302/HolocaustLinks.htm. See the Lesson Map on the uses of a Home page for how to create and post your own webpages.)

• Depending on your purpose in having students explore a website, provide students with some targeted task to perform as they are browsing. You may need to create a print handout to guide this work.

• If you have students assemble some information or impressions from a website(s), consider letting them share this information via a bulletin board or chat. For example, students could be assigned to explore and find four interesting things from this web site (or some other specific item you define for them to look for). In the last fifteen minutes of class, they could post these four items in the bulletin board. Students could then read and post replies to each other (perhaps as homework?). Similarly, after having students spend time exploring a website or websites, you could have them "chat" about what they saw and what they think about what they saw.

  One reason for having students assemble some signficant points from their explorations and then share them is to combat information overload and non-differentiation. It is important for us to help them view the information they are exposed to critically and analytically.

• Many sites have multimedia components--sound and video. Unfortunately, in our computer classrooms, only the Teach station has speakers. In order to allow students to fully experience the possibilities of a site, students will need headphones.