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Virtual Field Trips

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 immersive experiences, 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 VE tour, define your tour’s objective, create a storyboard, and film scenes with this planning outline.

This guide provides comprehensive instructions for collecting 360° footage for 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 timelapses to enhance the viewer’s experience.

This guide provides a suggested structure for implementation of the 360-degree Interactive Environments (360 IEs) 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 will help “standardize” the implementation of the 360 IEs for the purpose of the education research activities on the PolarPASS project.

Activities with Virtual Field Trips

These CEEE activities include virtual field trips and curricula focused on polar and alpine environments. For undergraduates, PolarPASS Interactive Environments uses real data to bring polar science and exploration into the classroom. For middle and high school students, the following resources offer lessons on the impact of climate change on ecosystems in Rocky Mountain National Park and snow changes in the Rockies, Arctic warming phenomena, and the evolution of Arctic scientific knowledge.

NNA-CO: Creating Virtual Tours with Infiniscope

NNA-CO: Creating Virtual Tours with Infiniscope

In this workshop, Infiniscope will covers why place-based educational tools are so important for an audience as well as demonstrate examples of virtual tours from a community-based project in Hawaii and Polar Explorer.

Additional Virtual Field Trip Resources

Explore more Virtual Field Trip resources from our partners. 

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CEEE Contact

ceee@colorado.edu
Phone: 303-492-5670
Fax: 303-735-3644

CEEE Mail

CIRES Center for Education, Engagement and Evaluation
University of Colorado Boulder
488 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309-0449

CEEE Office Hours

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