THE ADVANTAGES OF VIRTUAL FIELD EXPERIENCE IN THE K-12 CLASSROOM: THE FALLS OF THE BIG SIOUX RIVER

“The best teachers are those who show you where to look, but don’t tell you what to see.” -Alexandra K. Trenfor

With budget concerns foremost in the minds of school administrators, economical but effective ways of educating students must be found. The smaller the school district, the less funds available for such luxuries as field trips. If yours is a rural or remote school, the distance to interesting or meaningful sites can be an impediment to your students having chances to experience them. Virtual Field Experiences (VFEs) can be the answer to providing your students with previously inaccessible learning opportunities. Regardless of a school’s location or budget, a well-designed VFE can place the world within a student’s grasp.

The ReaL (Regional and Local) Earth Inquiry Professional Development Program was funded by the National Science Foundation to support educators in teaching about local and regional Earth system science through inquiry. The participants of this project consisted of teachers from across the United States. We met in South Dakota in the summer of 2013 for the purpose of creating a VFE of Badlands National Park. The group then met regularly online with Duggan-Haas for helpful guidance in creating individual VFEs of geological sites near the participant’s schools. My project is targeted to high school students with very little knowledge of geology in general or the geology of the Falls of The Big Sioux River in particular. A major focus of my project, in conjunction with my school’s Social Studies teacher, will be to demonstrate how the geology of the Sioux Falls contributed to the sociologic, economic and historic development of the region. This type of cross-curricular teaching can lead to much deeper learning because it teaches knowledge in the context of other knowledge. Crosscutting concepts such as patterns, stabilty and change, and cause and effect are a major component of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) currently being adopted by many school districts. When teachers of different subjects work together to help their students make these connections, their students gain much better understandings of the concepts of both disciplines. Collaboration between teachers models collaboration between students and shows that when we learn together, we learn better.