Electronic fieldtrips? What the heck is an electronic fieldtrip? Most of you are familiar with the elementary school and sometime middle and high school fieldtrips. I remember being in first grade and traveling to the diary farm to meet the Gersey and Holstein cows. With the advent and proliferation of computers into the classroom, students can travel vicariously to distant lands and places in what is commonly known as a virtual fieldtrip. However, I like to use the term electronic fieldtrip.

Elsewhere on this site I have advocated using personal travel experiences in one's teaching. So now I'm taking the personal experience to the next level. After doing a Net search on virtual fieldtrips and/or electronic fieldtrips, I have come to the following conclusion: most of them are "look at the 360 of this place or that place." There were no contextual clues as to what the visitor was to do, see, or learn.

Image how excited I was when I came across the homepage of winery producers from the Napa Valley area of California. There was a beautiful image map of the country with the names of the winery. All I had to do was pick one and off I'd go to that particular winery. Each winery on the tour had the same type of homepage, and each winery had links to a virtual tour. Visitors could choose a broadband tour or a narrow band tour, depending upon the type of connection. Well, since I had just installed a DSL line I went for the big guns and took the broadband tour. Well let me tell you, pages, pictures, movies just flew open and in the terms of a fellow colleague, "stuff downloaded so fast that you could hear them 'clunk' when finished :-)."

Back to the winery. Once I selected the tour, I was presented with a 360 view of the front of the winery -GREAT. On to the vineyards-on to the vats-on to the wine tasting room. Shoot, I was so excited that I could virtually taste and smell the wine. Boy was I slam dunked-I had already been on the tour. The tour consisted of the 360 view of the front of the winery. I tried several others, and all I got was a 360 of the front of the winery.

Maybe my expectations were too high. When I think of a tour, I think of going places and learning things, either on my own or with a knowledgeable guide. Since I couldn't find any I considered worthy, I decided to develop my own electronic tour or fieldtrip of the Roy Hyatt Environmental Study Center in Pensacola, Florida. So this electronic tour becomes my "proofofconcepts" for this aspect of learning via computers and the internet.

I chose this Center for a number of reasons: I became the second director of the Center in 1993, but left in 1996, I have access to much material, and the School District's superintendent wants to close it and save the salaries of the staff (director, teacher, and custodial staff) as part of a pay raise package. I understand the superintendent's dilemma and need to provide raises, the teachers in this county are the lowest paid in the state of Florida. But I don't know if there is one teacher who wants to give up this wonderful resource.

However, in this case if the superintendent gets his wish, the land and all buildings, improvements, community involvement of 34 years, and resources revert to the Feds for breach of contract. The school district is required to use the facility as it now stands, for 30 years or until December 2009. After that it belongs permanently to the school district.

Well I'm here to tell you the developers in the area will be beating down the Fed's doors to gain access to such a wonderful place, already laid out with historical buildings, trails, greenhouse, and forested land all in place. So this electronic tour is being developed so that teachers and students will know that once upon a time there was such a place unique amongst school districts, but the only way they can ever visit it again may be via computer-how sad.

I've designed this first tour to begin with the dogtrot home (opens into a new window). Don't know what a dogtrot home is, then follow the tour link below. By the way you must have Apple's quicktime plug-in installed in your browser. If you see room for improvement or would like to see other activities, etc., please drop me a line, when time permits, I'll try to implement them.