Virtual Field Trips Bring World of Educational Experiences Home

September 23, 2022 byChristopher E. Nelson

6 min to read

An online school student and parent attending a virtual field trip

Taking field trips to museums, planetariums, historical sites, parks, and other interesting sites are often the high point of a child’s school year. They’re fun, but they’re also educational, allowing children to have hands-on experiences with academic concepts and materials outside of the classroom. A field trip can bring school subjects to life and rekindle the desire to learn. A field trip might spark an interest in a subject beyond schoolwork that leads to a new hobby or even an eventual career.

Connections Academy® free online home schools offer a variety of field trip opportunities for students to reap the same educational and motivational benefits. In addition to local places to explore, virtual field trips allow online school students to see places, things, and people from their home classrooms that they would normally have to travel to see. A virtual field trip can take students, well, virtually anywhere.

What Is a Virtual Field Trip?

A virtual field trip is a guided, educational exploration of a place, time, or idea online. There are countless virtual field trips available for free or a nominal fee. Virtual field trips can be incredibly simple or quite elaborate.

Simple Virtual Field Trip Idea

Let’s say your child is studying desert climates. Maybe a virtual field trip to the Southwest is in order? With a quick search, you could find a virtual field trip to the Sonoran Desert. The Sonoran Desert covers about 100 square miles of the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico. This virtual field trip is a three-minute video introduction to animals and plants that have adapted to desert living, such as the kangaroo rat, Gila monster, saguaro cactus, etc.

Elaborate Virtual Field Trip Idea

Or, as part of a geography unit about processes that shape the earth, like erosion, weathering, earthquakes, etc., you might consider a virtual field trip to a live volcano. The Mount St. Helens Institute offers a multi-faceted virtual field trip to the most active volcano in the Northwest’s Cascade Range. It includes a one-hour live, interactive tour of various field research sites around Mount St. Helens led by an expert educator, two recorded sessions that explore Mount St. Helens before, during, after, and since its cataclysmic 1980 eruption, and links for post-field trip activities that remain available for the remainder of your school semester. The program is recommended for grades 4–8 and costs $125 per group of up to 30 participants.

A parent and online student plan a virtual field trip.

How to Plan a Virtual Field Trip

Karrie Diffenderfer, a Kentucky teacher who prefers virtual field trips to actual group trips outside of the classroom, writes that teachers—or, at Connection Academy schools, Learning Coaches—should preview the trip before their students. “The most important thing you can do when planning for a virtual field trip is to make sure it is relevant to what you are learning,” she says. 

Many virtual field trips offer options for activities students can take part in, but they aren’t all possible due to time constraints. Therefore, you want to have a game plan.

Her tips for how to plan a virtual field trip meant to enhance classroom studies are:

Choose a virtual field trip that fits with what is being taught.
Determine what you want the student(s) to learn from the field trip.
Take the virtual field trip yourself to be sure your technology will support it and so you’ll know what your student will see and hear.
Gather the documents and work you want your student to complete. You might have older students take notes to aid in discussion of the trip afterward.
If you will be interacting with a live expert, have your student prepare questions ahead of time. Questions will come up during the presentation, too.

Finding Virtual Field Trips for Kids

You can find numerous online excursions to add to your arsenal of tools for enriching your homeschool curriculum. Find them by searching the web with various combinations of “virtual field trips,” your topic of interest, and any qualifiers you’d like, such as “free” or “for elementary students.”

Instead of searching for individual excursions, you might consult one or more companies that have developed libraries of virtual field trips. These sites’ catalogs of virtual field trips are available for free and/or with subscriptions:

Nearpod VR. Nearpod offers VR headsets to make its virtual field trips more immersive, but they are not required. They offer more than 450 recorded trips focused on science, social studies, math, life skills and other academic subjects. They also offer virtual college tours. Nearpod lessons can be personalized for individual students.
FieldTripZoom. FieldTripZoom Zone is a subscription to live weekly virtual field trips organized around educational subject areas, including science, technology, engineering and math, arts and humanities, history, and more.
The Exploring by the Seat of Your Pants program of virtual field trips is free. This year, it has focused on exploration of the wreck of Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance, which was found on the Antarctic sea floor last spring, 107 years after it sank.

A family takes a virtual field trip for elementary students.

Virtual Field Trips for Elementary Students

Museums, parks, zoos, and similar educational institutions that you might visit in reality are likely to offer virtual educational programs suitable for younger children. In some cases, a stationary webcam captures enough to create a virtual field trip. Here are some favorites:

Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History offers virtual tours of select exhibits of areas within the museum using a format that walks you through it. Virtual visitors can also see select collections, research areas, and past exhibits no longer on display. There are also narrated guides to the exhibits.
Smithsonian National Zoo has several webcams focused live 24/7 on animals in the zoo’s collection. The giant panda cams are a must-see, of course, but who’s up for a trip into the naked mole-rat burrow?
Monterey Bay Aquarium has its playful sea otters on a webcam 24/7. Other live webcams focus on sharks, penguins, the zoo’s aviary and open-sea aquarium, the Monterey Bay, and more.
Yellowstone National Park does an outstanding job for the virtual visitor by positioning nine webcams—one live-streaming the Old Faithful Geyser and the surrounding Upper Geyser Basin and eight static webcams—to provide views of different parts of the park. There are also virtual tours that walk you to such sites as the Upper Falls of the Yellowstone River, Lookout Point above the Lower Falls of the Yellowstone River, Dragon’s Mouth Spring, and Canary Spring. The park’s website has many informative written and photographic features as well.
National Geographic Expeditions takes you on a virtual Cruise to the Galapagos Islands to learn about the Galapagos’ diversity of animals and plants found nowhere else in the world.
NASA Communications Specialist Joshua Santora and NASA STEM Engagement Specialist Rachel Power guide students on an immersive virtual reality tour and overview of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, the agency’s partnership with SpaceX to renew human space flight. Each of the seven videos is accompanied by an explanatory PDF.
The Museum of Aviation offers several historical virtual field trips, ranging from Wonder Wings, which teaches pre-K students about “things that fly,” to a specialized tour of a WWII hangar and a Tuskegee Airmen exhibit (grade 5), a tour guided by Rosie the Riveter, who explains how the roles of women changed to support America’s WWII efforts (grades 4–12), and others. These 30–45-minute tours cost $75 for up to 100 participants.

What else would you like your student to see and experience? Just a few clicks and you could be good to go without even worrying about whether your kid remembered to bring home the permission slip.