Describes how two social studies teachers designed a website in order to grant the other teachers in their school district access to the field trip database for the Washington-Baltimore area; furthermore, the idea for an elementary social studies website expanded into other projects that were also timesaving resources, such as the Electronic…

Discusses the use of virtual field trips based on experiences in a grade 6 science classroom. Considers cost effectiveness, lists online resources, and includes a chart and descriptions of 11 specific virtual field trip sites suitable for elementary and secondary school classes. (LRW)

New teachers expect many things in educational life to be complex (e.g., classroom management, lesson planning, administrative paperwork, relationships with colleagues and students' parents), they still underestimate the amount of detail that goes into creating effective learning experiences daily. Field trips, for example, always sound like a…

This paper surveys research over the past decade on school group visits to museums. By shifting attention to students' views about field trips, to their socially negotiated learning behaviors during field trips and the interaction between learning in the classroom and in the museum, this research has afforded a deeper understanding of the nature…

The field trip is probably one of the most common out-of-classroom learning experiences students encounter. Teachers provide these experiences for a variety of reasons including motivation, exposure, and even as a reward, especially after weeks of standardized testing. Although teachers may report that a primary reason for including the field trip…

There is a moment, when rifling through archives, when a subject, a substantive line of interpretation, gradually emerges. Sometimes returning over time, one recognizes the significance of an image or document that has been ignored heretofore. This was the case when looking through boxes of photographs, freely linked to schools, searching for …

Visits to science museums can provide a complement to the science learning carried out in schools. However, science museums are informal learning environments where teachers usually have very little control over the ideas being implicated or the experiments that the students carry out. It is necessary to design educational materials for the visit…

In this article, the author describes the learning her students gained from their field trip to the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago. On their trip to MCA, her fourth-grade students discovered new and surprising ways to approach the work of artist Dan Flavin.

Interim semester field trips provide a unique opportunity for undergraduate students to collect field data in support of their capstone research experience. We encourage students to participate in collaborative research projects prior to the semester for which they enroll in the capstone course. Students select a research project based on a field…

As the drafting instructor at Tri-County Career Center (TCCC) in Nelsonville, Ohio, the author is proud and pleased to give students real-life drafting experiences that apply learned theory. One of the best experiences his students have had involves taking part in building a custom home. Another is producing authentic house plans. The author also…

This paper examines school liability for school violence-related student injury in South Korea and the US. The study found that the US courts considered only violence-related behaviors of the perpetrator when judging whether violence can be foreseen; thus drug abuse or verbal abuse by the perpetrator were not considered as a part of his/her…

Words and their meanings are the building blocks of literacy development. They are the key to children's comprehension of stories and information books. Just about any fun experience, from learning center activities to a field trip to sharing picture books, offers many opportunities to build children's vocabulary. In this article, the author…

This article describes a 3-year study of school visits to four natural history museums and addresses the research agenda with regard to out-of-school learning. More specifically, the findings focus on the "process of learning" in museums. Comprehensive data collection allowed for an analysis of patterns of guided visits, the way the…

When parents and staff at Winter Park Elementary School in Wilmington, North Carolina, realized that some children could not afford school activities, such as purchasing ice cream on Fridays, they decided to level the economic playing field. The school began eliminating all practices that required students to spend money to participate. Students…

Field trips to the Michigan 4-H Children's Garden must provide rich science learning experiences for students and teachers. A key to this is getting students to ask questions. To facilitate student question asking we developed the Wonder Wall, a "wall" where students could write their questions. Student questions were answered as part of…