Week 6 PLE Post

This week included the completion of our Virtual Field trips and along with posting that project we are supposed to think of other complimentary activities to go along with it. These were a few that I came up with along with my group. (It may be helpful to note that these activites are intended to instruct students on varying ecosystems.

1. Discussion, Creative Writing – role play as settlers looking for a place to live. Where will we live? (i.e. Tall mountain, beach, forest, etc.)
-Discuss pros and cons
-Write an autobiography including specifics relating to their environment and community (how they adapted, etc.)
2. Identify kinds of places where people actually settled. Tell why.
-Discuss kinds of places where no one ever settled.
-As a class create a list of characteristics that a good environment has.
3. Sensory Activity
-Exploring different environments.
-Close eyes and visualize a forest (spray pine air freshener, play rain forest sounds)
-Feel a pyramid (pyramid w/ sandpaper)
-Beach (sand in water, feet or hands in the sand and water, play beach sounds)
-Make toilet paper roll binoculars. Go outside and find these characteristics in their own environment.
4. How do we adapt to our environment?
-(i.e. house on stilts because of flooding
5. Students will collect all the components they would like for their "ideal place to live"
-The students can use a wiki to discuss their elements. Since our classroom is a blended learning environment, this will be an asynchronous group homework assignment.

As a preparatory step for making the field trip we were asked to watch a vew virtual field trips and I watched the following fromt the examples:

-WWII Holocaust: I liked how the locations in this tour applied well to the topic and I learned some new things watching it.
-Ancient Ruins: I thought this tour was particularly impressive and it had a lot of great added content like videos and great questions to go along with it.
-Celebrations around the world: I liked this tour because the celebrations it highlighted were very different and give kids a good idea of what celebrations are like in other parts of the world.

I think implementing a virtual field trip in the classroom would be a very good thing in the right situation. With special education classroom it may not always be beneficial but I love the idea of using different means of technology to teach these concepts. This project made me think outside the box on how to teach kids the basic concepts.