A New Way For Students To Take A Field Trip

Class field trips for students can provide children and teens with a unique and interactive learning experience. A well-thought out experience can sometimes offer an educational experience for the children that they will never forget.

There are field trips of all different kinds: visits to the zoo, parks, aquarium, different museums, and more.

The experience of a field trip, whether organized by parents of home-schooled children or teachers with an official institution etc, can be overwhelming to organize at times. There are concerns for cost for everyone involved, transportation worries, making sure no one goes missing, and so on.

There is quite often a lot of headache involved in obtaining the appropriate permission from all levels before the field trip can take place, permission slips need to be acquired, and personal meditation information etc. Perhaps these various difficulties have played a part in contributing to the declining trend of field trips in schools around the US today.

Well, Virtual reality technology might help them to make a comeback...sort of.

Because so many teachers and schools have cut back on field trips, those who want to try and provide their students with a unique learning experience have had to come up with different ideas. One of those has been to introduce virtual reality (VR) technology to the students.

More teachers are turning to use VR to try and capture the attention of their students.

In Wisconsin for example, elementary students there recently got to experience a virtual reality field trip thanks to the help of a cardboard VR kit and a smartphone.

And they aren't the only ones. With the use of this technology, students are able to be transported across the solar system, back to a different time, or to a specific geographic region etc. There are many augmented and virtual experiences that have been created and are being used now around the US, and the students don't need to ever leave the classroom.

Google Expeditions offers hundreds of different virtual reality field trips that can be enjoyed when you use their Android app and the Google Cardboard viewers. Now students can use this technology to get a different perspective about what they might be studying or interested in at the time.

Traditional field trips might seem like they've become something of the past, but thanks to the decreasing price in VR technology it's now made it more accessible to teachers to turn to as an option to try and give their students a more well-rounded learning experience.

Pics:
Pixabay
Pixabay
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert via recode.net/2015/10/1/11619112/stephen-colbert-on-virtual-reality-it-really-feels-like-im-watching

Sources:
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/09/study-students-really-do-learn-stuff-on-field-trips/279720/
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2008/05/19/field-trips-going-extinct-schools-cant-spare-time-or-dimes-field-trips
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2016/06/08/fewer-field-trips-mean-some-students-miss-more-than-a-day-at-the-museum/
http://fortune.com/2017/08/29/virtual-reality-field-trips/
http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/18/health/virtual-reality-schools/index.html
http://www.wearegreenbay.com/news/local-news/virtual-reality-field-trip-for-students-at-little-chute-elementary/880681073
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/07/05/google-expeditions-vr-field-trips_n_10758026.html
https://www.wired.com/2016/06/went-vr-field-trip-tomorrow-heres-saw/
https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/20/google-expands-its-vr-field-trips-program-expeditions-with-an-app-for-classrooms-more-virtual-tours/

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