Blog Award(!) and Virtual Field Trips

I am pleased and honored to announce that this blog has been evaluated against 167 other elearning blogs and found to be a top ten elearning blog.  This blog came in 7th place, two under the highly respected Oxford University Press Blog for English Language Learner Teachers.  The rating agency is e-Learning Feeds, and they rated the blog based upon its rate of articles published, rate of social sharing, and the content value (70% of the rating).  You can find the rating along with a list of other top elearning blogs here:  http://elearningfeeds.com/top-elearning-blogs/

Also, as those of you who take my English lessons know, I provide additional resources for my students from the very first lesson.  After our first full lesson, I provide a book list of interesting books at the student’s current level of English.  Once students are working from Level 3 and above, I provide extra resources that students are not required to read or watch, but that provide interesting ways for students to get more English practice.  These include videos, slideshows, and other online material that have to do with the topic of that week’s lesson.  Students who are working at Level 3, for example, look at a virtual tour of the Statue of Liberty in one of our lessons.

I found a source of a few more websites that provide virtual field trips to interesting sites around the world:

• Statue of Liberty – This National Park Service web site will take you on  a virtual tour inside of the winding steps up to the top of the lady’s crown looking over the New York City Harbor.  There are also other great pictures to be found on the Statue of Liberty website here: http://www.nps.gov/stli/photosmultimedia/photogallery.htm
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• Life of Art from the J. Paul Getty Museum  – Looks like it is just for the iPad, but there are photos and 3-d pictures and descriptions about where different objects in the Getty collection came from.
• Smithsonian Museum Mobile – For your iPhone/iPad or Android mobile device.  This offers highlights, collection searches, tours, and podcasts about the contents of the Smithsonian Museum.
• Lascaux Cave – For any computer to access online, this site allows you to take a virtual walk through the Lascaux Cave (cave in the southwest of France that contains beautiful paintings from people who lived during the Stone Age).  As you “walk” through the cave, click on the “explore” button of each set of pictures you see, and the virtual tour lets you “stop” and shines a light on each drawing for closer inspection.  
• Sphere – Iphone/Ipad, Android.  There are many virtual field trips here.  You can view Paris from a hot air balloon, sit in the American Idol audience, white-water raft around a glacier, and many others.  This collection continues to grow, because users can upload their own Sphere adventures.
• Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago – This virtual tour takes you inside an operating room of a hospital.  This one does not appear to be free.
• The White House – Google and the president have allowed Google to use their 360 degree view cameras on location at the White House, taking you on the same tour to the same rooms on the public White House tours.

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