"Outsourcing" Field Trips!

This was an idea inspired by the conversations I've been having with several people here at CR2.0 (James Dykstra and Kevin)! Finally, Lisa Parisi, Christine Southard and I have put the rubber to the road, so to speak, and now let's see this Ferari FLY! Please add ideas as you see fit! It's in pretty rough form, but we collaborated over distance through Google Docs and if you have LOTS of improvement ideas, let me know...I'll invite you in to the Google Docs page to have a go!

Outsourcing Field Trips: an International Collaboration

The idea is twofold at this point:

1. Students will collaborate to create a shared picture of their state (or portion of the state).
* Both environmental and historical information will be shared.

2. Students will collaborate to learn more about various aspects of their nation and the world by "outsourcing" field trips to partner schools. Participating schools will "honor-system agree" to host at least 2 field trips and would have access to at least 2 field trips.
* Field trips can be environmental, historical, or both.

Further Investigations:

1. Go global. Include students from other parts of the world. They will create a virtual field trip of their own country, province, township, etc.
2. After using field trips, set up Skype calls to actually "meet" student creators.

Questions to Answer:

* What makes your area/state unique?
o Geographically
o Politically
o Culturally
o People
* How has your area/state changed over time?
* What caused these changes?
o Historical
o Industrial
o Environmental

Tools to Use:

* wikis
* blogs
* Skype
* Instant Messaging
* YackPack
* Trailfire
*

Ideas for Virtual Field Trips

* Video tape historic homes and other sites
* Create podcasts describing history of area
* Build Wikis for virtually participating schools to add additional online info or questions
* Create/Design still photos of hired students with their artifacts
* Blog about sites in order to invite comments and questions
* Create advertisements (persuasive text) to entice other schools to hire you
* Trailfire for online studies?

http://www.field-guides.com/

http://www.spokaneaquifer.org/kids/wces/

Specifics of Offered Info

* Historic Sites
* Environmental Areas/ Biomes
* Different Communities
* Interviews with People with Historical Knowledge and Experience
* Government Buildings
* School Buildings including classrooms and surrounding grounds
* Careers Investigations

Curricular ties:

Science:
* biomes
* watersheds
* biographies
* discoveries/laboratories
* experiments (physics)
* animals in native surroundings or zoos?
o Zoos would be good for areas of interest
* space laboratories/observatories
* Earth Science field trips--going to see various geological phenomena
* human health issues
* environmental/global warming studies
* "green" sites and locations that are off the grid or making other positive-solution impacts

Social studies:
* Wars/battlefields/soldiers
* Turning Points/Major Movements in history
o Industrial revolution
o Westward expansion
o Women's sufferage
o Cold War
o Japanese internment camps
o Slavery
o Gold Rush
o Colonization (US and global)
o Expansion of recognition of human rights (american/french revolutions, magna carta)
o Holocausts/genocides
* Present Day Events
o 9/11
o Landmarks in Politics
o Changes to Geography
+ due to Global Warming
+ Industrialization
+ Population Changes
* Geography/location
o Areas of Interest
* Culture studies (religion, belief systems)
o religions
o immigration (past and current)
o native americans
* Famous figures in history (biographical investigations)

Careers Studies (aka distance and collaborative Job Shadowing):

The idea is that a student is paired with another student of similar career interet (general field of interest). Each student conducts a jobshadow and documents the day's work/learning. They then come back and share it with another student.

* 16 Careers Clusters
* Kuder Career Planning System

Tags: archiving, blog, collaboration, distance, fieldtrip, history, jobshadow, learning2.0, networking, outsourcing, More…science, tools, virtual, wiki

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by SusanTsairi on July 30, 2007 at 4:05am

What are regular school hours where you are? Here we start at 7:55 and end at 14:10. Bringing them in early would mean starting at 7 in the morning - might not be a problem for them but BIG problem for "I'm not a morning person teacher" :-)

Susan

Permalink Reply by JoNelle on August 7, 2007 at 8:12pm

Regular school hours are 7:45 am - 2:30pm for students. Some students have to arrive early because of their bus schedules or parents dropping them off before work. I plan reading/math/technology activities for interested students in my computer lab.
I KNOW what you mean about 7am being so early, but I quickly adjusted.
(I do not know if we are having it this year.)

Permalink Reply by Christine Southard on August 9, 2007 at 5:20am

*We definitely need to take time zones into consideration. We should set up a graph on a wiki for all of us to access and plot our student availability times.

BTW - I cannot function in the a.m. without a big cup of coffee. :)

Permalink Reply by Ginger Lewman on August 9, 2007 at 6:36am

Time zones have been for me, and will be for my students this year, and exciting accidental education. Of course, I'm well aware of the US time zones, and also am aware of how the zones are plotted against Greenwich Mean Time (I'm living in GMT -6 to the globe, but CDT for the US).

What has made this a delightful accident of education is more of a cultural realization. It's an "in your face" realization that the rest of the world doens't move by US time! :) When we're collaborating with someone at a distance, anytime we talk about time, we must take into consideration the others' point of view. All this seems obvious, but unless you've been collaborating with people across the nation/globe, and you've tried to make meeting appointments, you've not had to experience that math associated with time zones! I can't wait for my students to begin realizing where they are in the world, as associated with GMT!

Permalink Reply by JoNelle on August 9, 2007 at 7:51am

I do not have to do early morning 7am club time. (I'm EDT in SC). I'll have a very flexible schedule that I just put in Google calendar to share if/when needed.
Anyone ready to get down more details? I am so ready to try out all of these new tools with classes. I have lots of puzzle pieces, just do not know how I'm putting them together yet.
Today I'm going out to get pics of our community.
Christine- Like the wiki idea. Different times/zones are a plus (it seems) for wikis. I have a wiki that I am practicing with this month. Want me to set it to public for a while? Or I can send invitations to join. It is on wikispaces.
Ginger- My students will be pumped to help out with time zones. Many of mine moved here from all over.

Permalink Reply by SusanTsairi on August 9, 2007 at 7:54am

link to world clock meeting planner

Another parameter that needs to be taken into consideration is the school year, start end and holidays, in a project with a school in the US we very nearly messed up the conclusion simply because we forgot to check the dates.

Permalink Reply by JoNelle on August 9, 2007 at 8:06am

You are right. I can probably add a link to our school calendar to the wiki. (Hi Susan!)