Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Virtual Field Trips

I'm always looking for opportunities to make connections for my student outside of our community. This fall the librarian and I launched series of "Lunch and Learn" experiences for our students.  We tried to find as many free live webinars that we could.   We then invited our students to come into the library about once a month with their lunch to learn about something new and exciting.

Here are some of my favorite places to find distance learning opportunities for my students:



NASA -
We did two live webinars this year.  The first was a live video chat with starts from The Martian movie and NASA experts.  The focus was NASA’s 2030 mission to Mars.  This was very high interest for our students as many of them had read the book over the summer and were very excited to see the movie.  


The second one we took part in was a little above many of our students level, but I was really impressed with the level of engagement. The main presenter spoke about the growth of protein crystals on the International Space Station. This investigation is critical to understanding human disease and developing new treatments.


In addition the Air and Space museum has a series called STEM in 30. The next one will be on May 11th @ 11:00 and 1:00 EST.  The focus of this one is the design of Helicopters and the history of Vertical Flight.  


The focus of these webinars is to broaden our student’s knowledge about what the Peace Corp does and the countries that they work in.  We participated in the Geography of Islam webinar this past January.   On camera were returned volunteers and current volunteers from  The Gambia, Morocco, and Indonesia.  The current volunteers often have very spotty internet, so the biggest struggle with these webinars is spotty connections - but it’s worth it for the information.
The Webinars on the Peace Corps website are also recorded to watch later.  


The Center of Interactive Learning and Collaboration is an amazing resource.  If you click on Content Providers (the saturn) you can search the massive database of the hundreds of Museums, Zoos, Aquariums etc from all over the world that offer content.  We have been very lucky in Vermont that we can access a statewide bank of funds in order to participate. But many of the Content Providers offer deeply discounted prices for schools with over 50% free and reduced lunch students.   


In past years we have invited our community in and connected with an Aquarium in the Great Barrier Reef of Australia.  We had a scuba diver in a tank chat with our students while they asked him questions about the reef and shark tank.  



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