Virtual Environmental Excursion
Contribution to the learning process
The students search for information about their river in the internet (reconstruction). Based upon relevant information, they work out a small presentation (Construction).
As to the integration in the FyR-context see "Online cooperation in your river project".
Targets
- To arrange information from internet about the river.
- To acquire competence to search for and assess information from WWW.
- To come in contact with the river - supplementing the Digital Photo Excursion.
- To create the basis for to define the leading question of the river project.
In your "Free your River!" project, the virtual environmental excursion shall supplement - not replace - the "real" contact with the river.
The virtual environmental excursion does not focus at the online cooperation with another students group. Nevertheless, the students can search in the books of the river from other groups and, thus, find / identify other groups, which work at the same river (river system) and which might be partners for cooperative work in the project.
IT-tool
Our materials, files, links...
- Book of the River > My Book (Login) > Our exploration of the River > Our materials, files, links...
In your Book of the River > Administration, you can administrate, which tools (which content) of your book shall be public and which not. For the method described here, "Our materials, files, links..." should be public, like it is standard setting at the Free your River platform.
Expenditure of time for preparation and realization
medium
Time needed
2-4 hours
Target group
Your learning group in your school, or 5-10 students from it.
Requirements and preparation
No special preparation needed. You need- like general in "Free your River!" enough computer with internet connection for your students.
Realization
Start
The topic for the virtual environmental excursion is "Our river". If your river should be a bigger one, you can focus at "Our river in our village / town / district". Students and teacher define sub-topics / tasks for the excursion together, e.g.
- Water quality of our river
- Fishes in our river
- Our river - source for drinking water?
- Our river - a basis for craft, trade, enterprises?
- Our river - 100 years ago
- Our river in the mirror of literature (songs, poems, stories, fairytales, mythes and legends)
The tasks should not be limited too much / not be too restrictive. Of course, aspects, which are already known to the students or which more easy can be found e.g. in an atlas, should not be searched in the internet.
Main phase
Every participant gets a task for the excursion.
The participants search in the internet, using search engines. If it fits to their task, they also should search in other Books of the river, which can be found e.g. with the help of the interactive map of our platform (in addition, the Books of the river are searchable with search engines, too). The students collect the information at their computer inside a text file or a folder.
If two or more participants have thesame task, they can compare their results now and also do the following steps together.
For every task, the most important results have to be identyfied.
The students present the most important results to the whole group. Discussion.
Finish
The most important results shall be published in the Book of the river.
Because of copyright and to prevent overloading the book of the river, the students should present their impressions and knowledge short and with own words. For detailled information, links to the original source of information should be given. It is neither useful nor legal to take text, photos or other documents from other websites and to publish them at the own website, without a permission of the editor.
Experiences / results
You and your students can apply your experience in online searching. E.g. if the search engine gives too many results, specify your question...
Tips
The search phase and the prosessing of information for the Book of the river can be done as homework.
Literature
APEL 1999
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