Journal #5

Making Field Trips Podtastic!
By Aliece M. Weller, John C. Bickar, and Paul McGuinness

The article starts off explaining how Jay is taking part in a wireless, handheld field trip at the Boston Museum of Science. This fieldtrip incorporates a mix of podcasts, student multimedia creation, Web research, and interviewing based on one specific theme. The interactive field trips were created to have students time spent and engagement levels at exhibits increase. The article then talks about podcasting, and that in the museum setting it can be used to encourage collaboration and human interaction. By using a handheld PC device the students can walk around and experience the podcast. According to the article this idea has the ability to reduce active instruction during a field trip, while at the same time increasing student engagement. In this article the authors designed this program as part of their research and posted a video about the project online. They way the project works is that students can then experience museum exhibits in a guided way, but also explore it further on their own. They also talked about how in order to access the next piece of the podcast the students could take a short quiz that when answered correctly would unlock the next podcast.

Questions:

1. What is the benefit to making a fieldtrip podtastic?
In reading the article I saw two things that I really liked about this kind of set up. First, the students can individually learn as they go, and they can’t continue until they show they have learned the current material (a short quiz after each exhibit). Second, it means that students will get a more involved and personal look at the exhibits and material they are being presented, instead of just browsing each station.

2. What makes this type of field trip hard to successfully pull off?The article states clearly that in order to do something of this magnitude it would require a large amount of time from the teacher in advance of the event. The other thing that confused me was that I would not have the proper knowledge to know how to set up something of this quality. I think it is a great opportunity, but in order to work it would have to be something that could be learned in a seminar or online tutorial. The other thing is materials, I don’t know if access to what you would need would be plausible.