One of the great aspects of teaching social studies is that your curriculum is everywhere – historical site, a market, museums, a bank, government buildings, courtrooms .. you name it, it probably has something to do with social studies. Taking your kids on the road is always a great way to get the social studies to come alive, set the stage for inquiry and discussion, differentiate your curriculum, and offer something new by getting out of the classroom. How can we make these trips even more engaging and informative? Go tech!
The typical field trip is often accompanied by worksheets for students to fill out as they visit a museum, science center, or fine arts location. Also, reflection usually takes place after the trip, sometimes when students have already forgot what they’ve seen. Are you looking for ways to innovate on your next field trip, allowing students to be more interactive, integrate technology, ditch the clipboards and paper, and get real-time reflection and feedback? Here’s a couple of ideas to supercharge your next social studies odyssey with your students.
Of course, when integrating technology at any point in education, there needs to be one disclaimer – you need to have access to technology. The ideas below will work with mobile devices and tablets, but for much of it there will need to be cellular connectivity or access to the Internet. Many museums that you visit will have wifi access, but it’s always good to check before you go. Also, you may need a advance reconnaissance trip in order to plan out your awesome new visit. Just a note to remind you!
You probably already know it – Nearpod is a great engager and formative assessment tool in your classroom. However, it also has a lot of power when you take it on the road. You can create a Nearpod presentation that guides students as they proceed through a visit, or you can have them control the slides themselves. You can integrate visual cues of places and items to look for, specific instructions for the visit, and links to additional information that they may want to consult. You can also get feedback from them through Nearpod’s multiple assessment tools and solicit reflections as they travel through a site. The information you collect will be great for debriefing when you get back to school or in a common area at the location. They can even draw something from their experience!
The assessment tools also keep students on their toes and give them some responsibility for their own successful learning experience outside of the classroom – without the clipboard. If you control the slide show, you can also ask questions on the fly – and have the responses collected for later use. Here’s an example from a recent trip to Gettysburg – take a look! (The code to join the student paced presentation is PMGZT – give it a whirl).
Looking to crowd source student photos on your trip? There’s a ton of ways to do that with mobile devices. You could have students utilize a social media hashtag for your trip to document the experience from their eyes. You can also have students airdrop you their photos or upload them to a common dropbox or Google Drive folder when they return to school. It takes the camera work off of your shoulders – it certainly helped me in DC last year!
Another way to solicit feedback and collected in one platform is using Poll Everywhere. Ask students a pointed question about the visit or solicit some general feedback about the trip. Their responses will be collected in one single poll that can be private only for you or can be published for others to see. You can use it as questioning platform or get student reflections from a trip – just a few ideas!
If you want to record student observations on the trip in real time and have them available for others to hear, try Ipadio. Ipadio is a mobile podcasting platform that allows you to record audio from your cell phone and upload it to a media player. It’s super easy to do … so easy that I sometimes forget to do it! By posting the media player on the classroom website or learning management system, parents and colleagues can follow along on your trip. Combining the audio with images allows visitors to feel like they’re virtually going along on the trip.
You could also experiment with live streaming video platforms. Periscope, Facebook live, and Ustream are all methods of sharing live video to people online. If privacy is a concern, just check your privacy settings and limit the publicity of any link. You should also check your schools media policy for sharing student images.
Looking to keep kids engaged as they ride a bus to and from your location (or any other time)? If they have mobile devices with cellular connectivity, give Quizziz a whirl. You can create your own that deal with the location that you were visiting, or use it as a time to review class material. It’s also a good way to balance curriculum if you’re taking kids out of a different class in order to see a site in your subject. You can have them play a couple quizzes of the subject are missing. Prizes are always a great motivator, but the simple competition of the quiz usually does the job. Want to try your hand at some Constitutional questions? (If the game is active try 575335 for a code – it may need to be monitored!)
If you are taking a longer journey and want to collect everything in one happy place, a trip website is easy to use, especially if you front load it with essential info, pages, and embedded material. I have used both Blogger and Weebly to a great deal of success. Parents love keeping up with the group, and it also serves as a chronicle of the trip after the fact. Here’s our recent tour of DC – great times!
Of course, all of these ideas can be scaled for younger students by giving the instructor more control. A discussion of positive digital citizenship should proceed any souped up field trip – but you would probably talk about behavior expectations anyway, right? And, you can scale the amount to cater to how much you want your students on screens. It’s all up to the head traveler.
Have any other ideas about using tech on a field trip? I’d love to hear and see it. Please comment below or share with me (and others) on Twitter. Have fun the next time you hit the road!
SOCIAL STUDIES OUT LOUD! 