One of the greatest challenges my teachers have in our virtual school, is to find adequate online resources to give students avenues of pursuit in a topic not bound to text. Doing a Google search is easy and almost second nature to high school students, which, unfortunately means that quick search results tend to be somewhat shallow wikis, blogs, and podcasts. Digging deeper requires effort and encouragement to persevere. In a virtual class, the teacher needs a host of tools that can engage the students to dig deeper and explore offshoot interests from the main topic. In a F2F classroom, this engagement can come from things like project-based learning, hands-on activities, and experiential learning. How can this be replicated in a virtual environment? This is, perhaps, the most challenging aspect of virtual environments. I was quite pleased with the quest on Virtual and Remote Labs from the Emerging Technologies category. I am constantly on the lookout for new sites that offer the chance to students to ‘get their hands dirty’ in digital simulations of real-world activities. The article in the NMC Horizon Report: 2013 K-12 Edition (pgs. 32-35), Virtual and Remote Laboratories, looks at the development and advantages these experiences offer online students. The more we can build a data base of viable remote activities that allow students to engage in manipulation of scientific apparatus, mathematical constructs, chemistry and physics labs, and even language labs. Taking our students on virtual field trips allows students to interact with the target environment and the experts working in the field. I’m sure Novi would rant about kids needing to actually have a chance to feel the squishy parts of a frog during a dissection or see what happens when the chemistry lab starts on fire when an activity goes off track. While I tend to agree that the visceral experiences we get from physically interacting with our learning is invaluable, this should not stop us from giving our online students the closest experiences to real life that we can. Virtual and remote labs are not just for virtual students, any student can benefit from the array of opportunities presenting themselves today. A great example of this is the opportunity for students to engage directly with experiments on the International Space Station with the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP) with Mission 10 launching in February, 2016. Another is the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre which offers virtual field trips and live labs in marine environments. There is enough diversity of online experiential activities to even keep Yesvi happy for months of hands-on exploring. I can honestly say that there is enough online interactive activities that both online and F2F teachers can use to benefit their students. This is one more box of tools I can help my staff build to give our virtual students excellent opportunities to interact with various learning situations that they may never have, given their location and personal circumstances. Real-world learning, literally at their fingertips. How cool is that? Please check out some of the linked pages for examples.
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