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Virtual excursions ideas

Virtual Australia - exploring Australia online

National Parks

Zoos

  • Zoos Victoria : take your kids/students to check out the four live camera streams and see if they can spot the animals. “See Melbourne Zoo's three baby Snow Leopard cubs as they play under mum's watchful eye in their den. Enjoy the penguins as they go about their busy day; look up high and spot the giraffes as they spend most of the day eating; and check out the lazy lions of Werribee Open Range Zoo as they lord over their very own Pride Rock.”

Government buildings

Museums

Historic sites

Cities

  • Hidden Melbourne : this website is loaded with amazing virtual tours of “...places that are often not accessible such as the tops of towers, derelict buildings and even some that have since been lost to redevelopment.”

Visual collections

Virtual Globe - exploring the world online

Museums & Galleries

  • Tour the Louvre, Paris : currently there are two virtual tours of the Louvre - Egyptian Antiquities and the Remains of the Louvre’s Moat, both of these require Flash to be enabled. There is also a mini tour/information site on the restoration of the Galerie d'Apollon, which also requires Flash.
  • The British Museum’s Collection Online : There are currently 2,335,338 records available, which represent more than 4,000,000 objects. 1,018,471 records have one or more images.
  • British Museum via Google Arts & Culture
  • The Dali Theatre-Museum, Catalonia : By means of this virtual visit, we invite you to take a tour around some of the museum's rooms and see some works and objects exhibited there by means of panoramic pictures. NB: requires Flash to view panoramic images.
  • The Vatican : seven different 360º tours of museums and other locations within the Vatican
  • Online exhibits @ the National Women’s History Museum, USA : 29 different online exhibits examining Women’s history in the USA, although I’ve noticed a lack of any mention of First Nations women.

Historical sites

Orchestras, Operas…

  • Take me to the Opera : OperaVision has 21 operas from companies across the globe available for you to share with your students. Each thumbnail takes you to the specific performance’s information page where you can view the YouTubeLive video, read up on the cast, the story and insights into the opera.
  • Berliner Philharmoniker Digital Concert Hall : if you register before March 31, the Berlin Philharmonic is offering a free 30 day pass to access their digital concert hall.

Animals - in the wild, in the farm, in captivity

a STEM focus

  • Langley Research Centre Virtual Tour (NASA) : click to view the map and then use the markers to visit different locations around Langley. Each marker opens up an information page about the location with a video and (scrolling down) additional information about the area and what happens there.
  • Glenn Research Center (NASA) : there are 10 virtual tours to take, including the Wind tunnels, Ballistics Impact Lab, the Space Environments Complex, and Zero-G.

Virtual Space - explore beyond the exosphere

A FUSE learning from home page has been established to support school and early childhood leaders, teachers, students, children and parents access digital resources that can be used to support learning at home. Resources include sets of self-directed learning activities that can be provided to students in the form of a Word document or as a printed workbook, and activities parents can do with younger children.

Penguin Random House is permitting teachers, librarians and booksellers to create and share story time and read-aloud videos and live events.

Joyce Valenza is a highly respected commentator in the field of school librarianship. Last week she created a great blog post about learning from home.

The World Digital Library is curated by the Library of Congress in the USA. It includes almost 20,000 items from 193 countries.

The International Children’s Digital Library has over 4600 titles in 59 languages freely available.

Global Storybooks is a free multilingual literacy resource for children and youth worldwide.

Google Arts & Culture features content from over 1200 leading museums and archives who have partnered with the Google Cultural Institute to bring the world’s most famous museums and libraries into your home.

Open Culture brings together high-quality cultural & educational media for the worldwide lifelong learning community.

Audible have made their children’s platform freely available.

Allen & Unwin has a large range of Teachers’ Notes and Teachers’ Tips that are free to download and should provide you with invaluable ideas for teaching and facilitating engaging discussions of individual titles. Teaching resources can be accessed by clicking HERE.

On the Resources page, you will find tabs for Teachers’ Notes (Teachers’ Tips are available in this tab, too), Activities, Catalogues and other useful material. Materials are added according to the date of release of the book, hence more recent titles will be higher up than older. Simply scroll down to find what you are looking for. Alternatively, if you want to see if a particular title has resources available, just type the name of that title in the search bar on the Homepage or click HERE, go to the title’s product page and scroll to the bottom of the page.

Allen and Unwin Guidelines on Virtual Read-Alouds

Teachers or librarians wishing to create virtual read-alouds are permitted to do so at no charge within a closed platform for your use only, for non-commercial use only, and as long as the video is removed after a limited time (30 days) and you acknowledge the author and publisher, Allen & Unwin. Unfortunately, we cannot grant permission for these videos to be posted publicly to YouTube at this time. Please confirm this is agreeable by sending an email HERE with your email address, role, the book you will be reading, and what platform you plan to do the reading on.

Jacaranda have activated a special offer for schools providing remote learning, you can learn more HERE

The Australian Children’s Television Foundation have collated some fantastic resources HERE

CommonSense media also have a brilliant list HERE

ABC Education have some great resources for media literacy studies HERE

This curated list of resources is to assist you to ethically share children’s and young adult literature online.

Mo Willems invites you into his studio every day for his LUNCH DOODLE. Learners worldwide can draw, doodle and explore new ways of writing by visiting Mo’s studio virtually once a day for the next few weeks.

Subjects: Library

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