Staying in is the new going out!

With museums, galleries and other cultural institutions closed during the lockdown, physical field trips are obviously not possible. However this does not mean that students can't enjoy virtual expeditions to institutions globally who are making their collections and buildings available online in different ways. Even without amazing resources, Google street view could be employed to enable virtual walking tours.

How might a virtual field trip work?

• You could send students off on their own to the virtual location of your choice, encourage them to explore and investigate it, and then ask them to share their observations in a discussion board or VoiceThread, or to develop a Wiki collectively about the site.
• You could pre-record your own "walking tour" using Zoom or Collaborate to record your own individual explorations, then ask students to watch this, take the same tour and then to add their observations.
• You could do a short synchronous tour together in a videoconferencing platform where you share your screen. Remember to record this for students who can not attend synchronously.
• If your field trip location is not closed, within travelling distance, and current social distancing measures permit, you could visit your location and make some short videos which you could then embed in a VoiceThread so that students can take the tour and comment.

This is an example below, recorded by Dr Melanie Giles for the course CAHAE10142 The Story of Britain, of a VoiceThread based on recordings Melanie made of the prehistoric landscape of Gardom's Edge in the Peak District.

Here is a walking tour of Pompeii created by a third party and available on YouTube.

Because this video is not owned by us, we can not provide a transcript of the text, but you can click on the "closed captions" button on the bottom right of the screen when the video is playing in full screen mode.

We might not be able visit locations in person, but where the digital resources exist it is worth exploring these with your students