Make More Of Your Field Trips by Writing a Review

It’s time for the Wednesday Website suggestion!! For two years, I was the Technology Specialist at a school in Georgia. During that time, I amassed a large collection of websites that I use with my students. You can download my E-Book of Websites for the Elementary Classroom for free from Teachers Pay Teachers or Smashwords, or, you can check back here each week for the Wednesday Website suggestion.

 

I am in the middle of planning my summer vacation.  We’ll be in the US for 8 weeks, and I want to do a lot of fun things with my kids while I’m there.  One of my favorite websites to use when finding new and interesting places is Trip Advisor.  I love to read the reviews and get a realistic picture of whether I think my family will enjoy the place before we head out.  However, I had never thought of using it with my class, until the other day.  Another teacher mentioned that we could let our kids review their field trips, and I thought – What a great idea! 

Normally, when I take my class on a fieldtrip, I have some sort of sheet created to help ensure students stay focused on what I want them to learn about.  This trip was no exception.  We used this Zoo Animal Recording Sheet, which focused on our current science topic of food webs, by asking students to identify the predator, prey and special adaptations of 20 of the animals they saw at the zoo.  (Feel free to download this sheet for free from Google Docs.)

When we got back from the zoo, we went on to Trip Advisor and left a review of our experience.  We wrote our review together, and it was a great time to talk about audience awareness, important details, focus and a bunch of other writing concepts.  Here is the review we left:

If you want to leave a review on Trip Advisor, you must sign up for a free account.  Then, you search your location and click on WRITE A REVIEW.  Once you have submitted your review, it will be reviewed and then published.  This is also a great time to talk with students about the technology concepts:

1.  Anyone can put information on the internet, so we need to read critically

2.  We can use the internet to build community.

3.  We can learn from and add to the internet.

What lessons could you teach using Trip Advisor?