Away We Go!!! Virtual Field Trips for the Classroom

Want to take a field trip but there’s no money in the budget for school field trips?  Virtual field trips are a way that you can take your entire class to places unknown, to visit students from other countries and to make learning more tangible and real to your students.  Virtual field trips are guided field tours through the Internet that provide an organized collection of web pages designed to provide a structured online learning experience.  Various options are available for classes to explore.  Teachers can use videoconferencing and audio conferencing technologies to set up dates for their students to meet and learn from other students in other states and countries. Using free services like Skype and a web cam teachers can set up interviews with authors, scientists and other professionals and take advantage of videoconferencing opportunities established by museums and zoos.  Hundreds of opportunities exist for virtual field trips; here is a brief list that can expand your teaching from the pages of a textbook to the real world. 
            La  Louvre 

Experience a 360 degree panoramic view of many of the museum's valuable attributes.  Tours include Egyptian Antiquities, Remains of the Louvre Moat, and the Galerie d’Apollon. 
Arctic Adventures 

Free to the K-12 community, Arctic Adventures uses exciting Arctic dogsled expeditions and Arctic research to help students understand natural and social sciences in the cultures of the Arctic.
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History   

Students can take a virtual, self guided tour, room by room, of the National Museum of Natural History.  Students can use their own computers or smart phones to follow museum map arrows to see exhibits for a virtual experience that makes them feel as if they are standing right in front of the exhibit.  
White House 
Students can take a virtual tour of the White House by watching inclusive “Inside the White House” videos and tours to the West Wing, East Wing, Residence and South Lawn.  For study on presidents, teachers can use the White House’s slide presentation of the presidents and historical information. 
Outer Space

No virtual field trip is complete without a trip to outer space through NASA’s downloadable field trip.  Students can explore areas on Earth that have been identified as sharing common traits to various Mars regions.  Younger students can take a trip to the Moon.