Introduction
Travel for education is not a new concept. Many of the world’s
learned citizens have recognized and endorsed travel as a mean of education.
Travel is a chance to explore a chosen site firsthand, to experience an
unfamiliar environment through interaction without pressure of formal homework
or test requirements. Travel involves an experience in which there is organized
learning.
In most educational area, field trip is known as effective educational tool to learn from outside of class. It takes the student mentally out of the classroom and into a new and different learning environment. In addition, it motivates and stimulates students to learn more, because it involves active, not passive learning. However, sometimes, it is time and money-consuming, difficult to organize, and often affected by the weather or health condition. Also, in many cases, the places educators would most like to visit are not nearby or are not open at the time they are covering them in the curriculum. In these cases, the next best thing to a real field trip would be a virtual field trip(The Virtual Field Trips Site).
Virtual field trip is a guided and narrated tour of web sites that have been selected by educators or guides and arranged in the links that students can follow from site to site with just the click of a single button. It is the best way to assemble, or thread together, the most important sites that tell a story or follow a theme. It has several advantages compared with real field trip. It can be repeated over and over again and give students more room to move at their own pace and explore things to their own depth. Also, it can take you to places you would not otherwise go and tap into more expert resources on a single topic. Besides, it is safe and free of hazards. However, it does not provide same sensory experience as a real field trip(The Virtual Field Trips Site).
