Exploring 21st Century's History through Blended Field Trips

Overview

Field trip is a key component in the teaching of History. This teaching plan made a breakthrough in the traditional mode of field trips. With the foundation of 'Flipped Classroom', it demonstrated differentiated instruction by developing a post-pandemic blended mode of field trips. Students completed online field trips at home by using Google Earth and Virtual Reality tools before the lessons. Teachers could then access their pre-lesson outcomes with the help of Edpuzzle and Google Forms, so as to adjust the levels of difficulty according to their performances. During the lessons, teachers could elaborate on the pre-lesson content, and use online teaching platforms like Kahoot! and Sutori to stimulate students' motivation and curiosity of learning, and also consolidate their knowledge. Group activities were then carried out for students with easy-to-use eTools like Google Docs and Slido, facilitating their collaborative learning. After the lessons, Padlet and CoSpaces Edu were used in extended learning activities related to the exploration of values. The blended mode of field trips can overcome the limitations of the traditional one, students could conduct self-learning unconstrained by time or location. The transfer between effective teaching activities does not rely on numerous teaching tools, but the transfer of formats that could help students understand and focus on learning. The teaching plan has made use of different online teaching tools, enabling students to learn the historical developments from different perspectives. Students can drill deeper on the inquiry activities according to their own learning paces. Through the diversified blended activities, students of different levels could all have the chance to participate and share their learning outcomes, which demonstrated the goals and implementation of differentiated instruction.

Participants of this open lesson will be invited to participate in activities related to some of the online teaching tools, for example expressing opinions and interacting with the speaker through Slido and Padlet.