Field Trips, Minus the Smelly Bus Ride
By Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 6/1/2005
As school boards nationwide are forced to wield the budget ax—extracurricular activities are often the first items to go. Sports, art classes, and even field trips are increasingly rare. Still, children are curious—and so some schools are turning to virtual means to take students out of the classroom.
"Many extracurricular activities were cut off by school budgets," says Ruth Blankenbaker, executive director of the Indianapolis-based Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration (www.cilc.org). "I knew class sharing was possible, but why use new money to do old things?"
The "old thing," when CILC was launched in 1994, was videoconferencing. Long the bastion of boardrooms and businessmen in suits, videoconferencing in the classroom has been largely used for distance-learning courses. CILC had a different idea.
"Science and cultural organizations are known for engaging and exciting learning," says Blankenbaker. "Why not connect locations known for engaging learning to places where, too often, students are disengaged with learning?" So, CILC connected schools to the Indianapolis Zoo, among other locations throughout the state.
Today, the nonprofit organization offers these virtual field trips from sites across the country—and to classrooms and libraries beyond Indianapolis. There are virtual excursions to NASA and the Baseball Hall of Fame, which offers several online programs, including one devoted to Yankee great Lou Gehrig.
Blankenbaker says all activities are interactive, meaning students can ask questions of the instructors and receive answers in practically real time. The trips are also available in a range of prices, from free of charge to $200 and above, with the average cost about $100.
Since launching the group's Web site 18 months ago, CILC has seen its traffic jump from 6,000 visitors a month to 30,000 in April 2005.
While a virtual field trip will never replace the smell of cold fish being fed to hungry seals or the prickly feel of a sea star, it's certainly worth missing another queasy bus ride.
