From Virtual Field Trips to Global Explorations: How Online Platforms Are Expanding Children’s Horizons

What are Virtual Field Trips?

Virtual field trips represent an opportunity for students to participate in the exploration of a location through the means of the Internet. It is much like a traditional field trip but without the long bus ride or nagging fear of losing anyone!

Whether it’s a city, historic site, museum, or natural area, students may experience different aspects of the location through photos, digital maps, audio, video, and other interactive media, receiving detailed information about what they are hearing or seeing in the process.

Virtual field trips are often organized by an educator or supervisor with predetermined Internet destinations and sites to guide the exploration in a structured way.

Why Implement Virtual Field Trips?

Virtual field trips can have a positive effect on schools in many ways.

Although there will never be a complete substitute for experiencing a place or culture firsthand, virtual field trips still enable students to explore parts of the world they may otherwise never have the opportunity to visit in a manner that allows them to retain some aspect of hands-on interaction.

What are the Benefits of Leading Virtual Field Trips?

If you can’t tell yet, I’m a big fan of virtual field trips. Here are my top four reasons why:

1. They’re free! Many traditional field trips require students to pay a fee in order to participate—and for lots of families, this is a financial burden that keeps their child from joining. It would cost thousands of dollars for me to take just one student to a Spanish-speaking country. Virtual field trips and their incorporation in blended learning remove this expense but still allow for learning that broadens students’ horizons beyond standard classroom lessons.

2. Once you create a virtual field trip, you can use it for years. Planning a successful traditional field trip is, at best, a time-consuming task for educators and other adult supervisors and, at worst, a downright logistical nightmare. With all of the extra work of collecting permission slips and money, coordinating activities, and arranging transportation, all too often, it’s simply not worth it to plan a standard field trip at all. Virtual options remove these logistical challenges.

3. No liability issues! With virtual field trips, you are able to maintain the structure of your classroom environment. While it is usually easy to get students excited for a traditional field trip, it is more difficult to monitor their behavior and their whereabouts during the outing. Planning a virtual field trip instead helps you avoid this free-for-all mentality.

4. You have more control over the content. Virtual field trips can be designed and tailored to complete very specific learning objectives, and they can easily be adjusted year to year if those objectives change. You can even provide different students with slightly different experiences, giving you another tool to meet students’ unique needs and personalize their learning.