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12 Benefits of Virtual Field Trips Every Educator Should Know
Virtual field trips are the smartest way to bring the world to your students without the cost & hassle of arranging a field trip.
Many of your learners would never have the opportunity to go to interesting places outside of your native city.
And there would be hundreds of obstacles you will face if you plan out-of-capacity field trips.
Virtual field trips can provide opportunities and experiences that many of your students might always dream of.
Not just saving you from field trip costs and hassle or just fulfilling your tour dreams,
another benefit of virtual field trips for teachers like you is that the teaching experience is relaxing and enjoyable.
Let’s go through the benefits of virtual field trips with some great benefits you can get by using it as one of your lesson plans.
Why should educators use virtual field trips in the classroom?
Not just mere words, let me show you some proven data from research.com that indicates how effective field trips are
in terms of increasing your student’s knowledge base.
See how good student feels as they are rating “virtual field trips” really high :
Not only about feeling amazing, most of the students learn more properly when the process goes with the term “ Learn with fun”
The neurologist Judy Willis demonstrated how enjoyable experiences increase the levels of dopamine and endorphins in our brains.
Dopamine, known as the “feel-good hormone,” can make learning feel pleasurable and rewarding.
These hormones play a crucial role in effective learning.
Now I am going to going to explain the benefits in five categories :
Learning Benefits of Virtual Field Trips
Let’s go through 3 learning benefits of virtual field trips now:
1. Self-perception of learning
Virtual Field Trips are full of learning potential.
Even though virtual field trips can’t take your students to different places physically, they can make learning more engaging and hands-on.
When done well, virtual field trips can make students feel like they are there, teach them new things, and get them excited about the topic.
Virtual field trips allow students to customize and adjust the experience to fit their personal needs and preferred way of learning. For example, students can often pause the virtual activities or go through them at their own speed. Virtual fields can help students solve math problems by providing interactive, context-based experiences and simplifying abstract concepts into understandable, real-life situations
You can read this research paper on the learning impact of VFT to get a deeper knowledge of how impactful learning VFT can bring to your classroom.
2. Helpful in K-12 education
After looking at many different research studies, scientists at the University of Sao Paulo found proof that virtual field trips can help teach students from kindergarten through 12th grade.
They found multiple studies where using virtual reality headsets for virtual education trips helped students learn better.
The researchers found educational VR provided significant benefits beyond just engagement. It led to improved skills-based learning outcomes as well as better knowledge recall and comprehension compared to non-VR settings.
3. Exposure to Experts
With pre-recorded virtual field trips, your students have discussions and interviews with subject matter experts.
Students are often excited to have the opportunity to talk directly with the explorer.
If you can manage video conferencing on your field trip with platforms like Skype or social media channels, your students can post their queries and receive real-time responses from the experts.
Here the benefit of virtual field trips for students is that it’s a small step towards active learning.
Your students can see a place with their own eyes and ask questions to an expert who has been there and experienced it.
Your students are far more likely to remember a topic when they can find the opportunity to engage, participate, and experience it themselves.
Engagement Benefits of Virtual Field Trips
We know what you are thinking!- My students will only look at a screen, where and how engagement between your students will come?
Here’s your answers :
4. Engage Student’s Senses More
Instead of just listening to a teacher talk, virtual trips can allow your students to see realistic visuals, hear sounds, and even interact using hand motions or controllers.
For example, on a virtual trip to the rainforest, students might see vivid 360-degree videos of the dense foliage and bright colors.
They could hear the sounds of birds squawking and monkeys howling.
5. Embodied Interaction Increases Student Engagement
The researchers discovered that being able to interact and experience things is extremely important for keeping students engaged. This kind of interaction is called embodied interaction.
When students can use multiple senses and truly interact with the learning material, they tend to be more excited about and involved in their learning process.
We all know how boring it can be to just sit and listen to a lecture without any way to participate meaningfully.
Accessibility Benefits of Virtual Field Trips
Virtual field tours break down barriers and below I listed down some accessibility opportunities that Virtual Field Trip open up :
6. Students with mobility restrictions
Virtual field trips allow students who have difficulty moving around or traveling to still experience going on a field trip.
They can join from wherever they are without needing to physically go to a new place. This is a great benefit of virtual field trips for students who are always on the go.
7. Students who are immunocompromised
For students whose bodies have a hard time fighting off illnesses, virtual trips are safer and easier than physical ones.
You can avoid risking your differently able students getting exposed to germs or catching something by traveling.
8. Students can access it from anywhere
No matter where your student lives or what their situation is, they can take part in a virtual field trip.
As long as they have a computer or device with internet, they can virtually go on a trip from their home, school, hospital, or anywhere else.
So, VFT is a great way to get fewer empty seats in your classrooms.
Collaboration Benefits of Virtual Field Trips
Virtual field trips share a sense of community collaboration. Now let’s go through some collaboration benefits of VFT :
9. Expanding Geographically
Virtual field trips allow your students and you to explore places and connect with people from all around the world, without having to travel there physically.
They can virtually visit museums, historical sites, national parks, and even other countries or cities that would normally be too far away or too expensive to go to in real life.
This expands the learning experience beyond the local geography and community, opening up opportunities to learn about diverse cultures, environments, and perspectives from a much broader geographic scope.
10. Share And Adapt the same virtual resources
Virtual engagement and remote collaboration can indeed help you to facilitate a spaced, interleaved, and practice-oriented approach to deep learning. Your students can share virtual resources among themselves which will increase their soft skills of collaboration and teamwork.
Financial Benefits of Virtual Field Trips
11. Cost Effectiveness
Virtual engagements obviously eliminate the need for travel, which is a big bang savings.
This is one of the big benefits of virtual field trips for teachers.
Also, you can play role a in saving the environment by reducing carbon emissions from flights and road transportation of physical field trips.
VFGs can potentially cut off some of the issues that physical field trips can create.
Traditional field trips principally those of an international nature have several disadvantages.
Because of the costs often many students cannot afford to participate.
Also, There may be gendered issues, cultural and language barriers, logistical issues, security issues, and problems in creating accurate risk assessments without prior visits by staff (Ternan, Charlkley, & Elmes, 1999).
Last But Not Least Benefits of Virtual Field Trips
12. Simplifying Teacher Experience
For teachers like you, organizing a traditional in-person field trip can be very complicated and stressful.
You need to plan transportation, lunches, chaperones, and permission slips, and juggle their regular teaching schedule around the trip day.
With virtual field trips, these kinds of hassles go away. You don’t have to worry about buses, packing meals, or finding enough parent volunteers.
You can schedule the virtual trip anytime that works best for their class schedule.
You can offer more to students while putting in less effort.
Creating your VFT
To create a virtual field trip for your students, First research well for the type of content your students are mostly attracted to.
Then start making your virtual trips. Here are a few things you’ll need:
First, you’ll need cameras to capture 360-degree photos or video footage of the places you want to virtually visit.
Next, you’ll need software that allows you to stitch those 360 photos/videos together into an immersive virtual tour experience.
WPVR offers an easy-to-use interface that allows you to create virtual tours rapidly, even if you don’t have any prior experience or expertise.
You can put together a basic virtual tour in under 5 minutes!
If you need assistance, WPVR provides helpful resources like YouTube videos & documentation for setting up and using it properly.
Become an Innovative Education Leader
With virtual field trips, you can provide your students with something better than dull regular classes.
Also, in this fast-paced growing world,
you need to take some extra steps to teach our students more than traditional teachers do.
To research well and pick the content idea,
you can go through the Discovery Education portal.
Then just plan your trip and use a reliable tool like WPVR to help you make your virtual field trips.
Frequently Asked Questions
FAQ1. What is a field trip as a teaching strategy?
-A field trip is an educational activity where students visit a location outside the classroom to observe, experience, and learn about something first-hand, enabling experiential and hands-on learning.
FAQ2. What is the advantage of the field method?
-The field method allows direct experience, real-world context, increased motivation and engagement, skill development, and interdisciplinary learning by conducting research or observations in authentic settings.
FAQ3. How successful are virtual tours?
-Virtual tours have proven to be a successful educational tool, offering advantages like accessibility, safety, cost-effectiveness, flexibility, and engagement. While not a complete replacement for physical visits, they provide a valuable complement or alternative to traditional field trips.
