Virtual Field Trips
Explore the world around you with CEEE’s virtual field trips and discover how immersive experiences with maps, videos, and interactive content can enrich learning and storytelling inside the classroom and beyond.
Virtual field trips provide opportunities to engage with unique places, whether it’s the edge of the Greenland Ice Sheet or alongside scientists measuring snow depth at Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. Virtual field trips, sometimes called immersive experiences or virtual reality tours, are more than just panoramic photographs. Virtual field trips contain maps, video, sounds, pictures, text, and even graphs to immerse you in a place and provide vital context. Virtual tours are a great way for scientists to share their work, for teachers to provide engaging learning activities for students, or for students to create and share their own experiences and stories.
Whoever you are, CEEE has compiled resources to get you started creating and using virtual tours.
Virtual Experience (VE) tours, also known as Virtual Field Trips, offer a way to virtually participate in research across various locations like remote field sites and laboratories. They include interactive elements such as text, photos, sounds, and videos, tailored to specific goals.
Learn how to plan a virtual field trip, define your tour’s objective, create a storyboard (template and example provided in the guide), and film scenes with the NNA planning guide:
Navigating the New Arctic Virtual Experience Planning Guide (Google Doc)
CEEE has developed a comprehensive guide building on the NNA footage guide and GoPro and InstaX instructional guides that provides comprehensive instructions for collecting 360° footage for Virtual Field Trips, also know as Virtual Experience (VE) tours, including recommended equipment, filming techniques, and storage solutions. It covers the use of 360° cameras and includes tips for capturing stable, engaging footage, emphasizing the importance of logging footage and using time-lapse to enhance the viewer’s experience.
View the CEEE 360 Footage Field Collection Guide (Google Doc)
PolarPASS has developed a guide to provide a suggested structure for implementation of the 360-degree Interactive Environments (also referred to as virtual field trips) in the classroom. In each of the steps below, the guide identifies the instructor task, describes what the students will do, and explains the purpose for the task. This guide was developed to “standardize” the implementation of virtual field trips for the purpose of the education research activities on the PolarPASS project.
