The Beginner's Guide to Interactive Virtual Field Trips By Jan Zanetis

I just read the article on Interactive Virtual Field Trips(VFT), and found myself even more excited to become an educator then ever before. The article basically explained the newest way to take a classroom on an adventure that will impact many of the students' lives. I am amazed at how much has changed since I was in elementary school, twenty years ago, and I am excited that students have a chance to experience things that they might never have had a chance to do, except in school. The VFT create opportunities to learn first hand and to learn in a way that is much more exciting than just opening up a text book and reading about the lesson for the day. I wanted to do a little further research on the VFT and went to www.puppets.org, and I experienced five minutes of a class trip to the Center for Puppetry Arts. My experience was filled with joy as I witnessed the students enthusiastic faces as well as the attention that was being paid to the Virtual on screen teacher. All of the students were engaged and had the chance to learn about puppets and learn how to make puppets from the puppet masters themselves! I couldn't help but think of the endless possibilities that students of today and the future had at their finger tips.

My hope, beyond the VFT, is that students still get out and see as much as the world as the can. The VFT are a great way for students to learn about anything, but to actually go to a site and witness, lets say the Great Pyramids of Egypt, is an amazing experience and can not even compare to just seeing it on a giant screen in a schools' tech lab. Kids today are so obsessed with technology that they forget to go outside and just play and be kids. Obviously, I would rather see, as a student, the Great Pyramids on a screen instead of just reading about it, and the VFT is a great way to engage students and really learn them about any subject. It is great that so many organizations have signed on to being a part of the academic world outside of their own world, and by just experiencing the one puppet website, I know that VFT are having a huge impact on students today and again I think about the possibilities, and they really are endless.

BLOG Speak Up 2009

The most important fact of this article is that the Speak Up organization is dedicated to ensuring today’s students are well prepared to be tomorrows innovators, leaders and engaged citizens, but it was discovered that the students themselves are taking matters into their own hands by adapting the tools they have become accustomed to in their personal life for learning. Students are no longer waiting for their schools or teachers to provide them with the implements or applications necessary to get ahead; instead they are on a personal quest to define their own learning. Students are using social networks to connect to other students across the world for collaborations, information sharing, and tutoring. Also, students are using online assessments and tests to do self-evaluations, and even taking online classes to just learn for the sake of learning. Students are finding ways to self-educate beyond the knowledge of their teachers and reaching out to experts in the certain fields and corresponding with them online. All in all, students are creating their own future and taking opportunities into their own hands.

I think it is extremely important to have competent teachers in the classrooms to motivate students and to facilitate them with the tools to learn, but a classroom can work both ways. As a future educator, I would be grateful to learn from my students and would encourage them to go outside of the box and find whatever answers they are searching for. I would never look at it like they were going over my head but maybe even taking a step further. In my first education class, 350, I learned to as educators we should take others ideas and build on them, and if that is what students today want to do… All the power to them!

Now for the students who don’t have a voice, Speak Up is very important to open the eyes of many people and see that education should be at the top of any list of importance in our nation. Now, a lot of students will not be as motivated as others and take online classes or assessments, but if all students had the ability to reach out to other students and ask for help on homework, they might feel more inclined to do it instead of not wanting to be “the only one in class” who couldn’t figure it out. The only other issue to not having access to computers are the students who have access but it is limited due to the fact a lot of schools block social networks, you tube, and other sites that students use today to learn about the world around them. My only thought of this is that the schools should have an all open access and if parents reject that then each individual parent can decide how much information their own kids can have access to, so that other students aren’t getting penalized for having open parents.

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