Students documenting their travels

by Langwitches ~ January 9th, 2007. Filed under: Uncategorized.

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Seeing the reaction and involvement of my students after just completing our China travels and documenting everything through our China Blog, the next logical step is to expand such an experience. Having never traveled with the single goal of transmitting the experience through technology and involving over 400 students, ranging in age from 4 to 12 years old, I have learned to “see” things differently. One experiences the people, culture, and landmarks quite differently when faced with having to document every step of the way. I asked more and different questions of the tour guides, trying to anticipate questions that might be asked by the students. What might interest them was always in the back of my mind.
Several students from our school already were inspired to take a bear with them as a travel companion on their travels during winter break.

What if…

  • …we created a travel blog for students and/or their parents to log in while traveling globally to share with the rest of us their experiences?
  • …we created a photo gallery of school “bears” who have traveled the world?
  • …create a template for students to help guide them being aware of cultural similarities and differences while traveling?

Incidentally, I read a post from Lucy Gray’s blog A teacher’s Life who write about “Supporting families who travel” and looks at ways of offering students who are traveling abroad the possibility to stay current with their school work and/or report from where they are in the world.

How easy it would be for parents to keep in touch with school matters if they had access to a laptop while traveling. We then moved on to thinking about kids blogging about their experiences from wherever they were and then we topped that by musing about providing a generic set of open ended digitally oriented assignments for kids on the road.

What other ideas do you have to involve students and use the collective travel experience and opportunities that present themselves in a school community to enrich everyone?

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3 Responses to Students documenting their travels

  1. Lucy Gray
    January 9th, 2007 at 11:22 pm

    Hi Silvia -

    Your China blog looks really interesting… I’m going to bookmark it for future reference.

    Here’s another one for you to check out:

    http://web.mac.com/michaelsearson/

    Thanks,

    Lucy

  2. Joe Dale
    January 10th, 2007 at 7:38 am

    Hi Silvia,

    Why not get your pupils to put together a Scrapblog for their China trip? See here for details:
    http://joedale.typepad.com/integrating_ict_into_the_/2006/12/scrapblog.html

    Best wishes

    Joe

  3. Kim Cofino
    January 26th, 2007 at 12:11 am

    I love this idea – I think it would be great to take advantage of the international school system to create a virtual field trip blog where we all “travel the world.” Students from schools all around the world can post pictures of where they live (or where they’re from) and share a story or comment about the location. We could even find a way to integrate Google Earth placemarks and actually “fly” around the world looking at all of the sights!

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