Imagine a school trip where you didn't have to fill in any paper work, carry around 5 epipens, 6 inhalers and a ridiculous number of spare pack lunches, no counting students onto and off buses, no registering every 5 minutes, no apologising for their behaviour, no debate as to whether they should wear uniform (if they do you can easily see where they are but if they don't no one knows that the children belong to you...). Well look no further: google have the answer!
Google Expeditions is an app for your smart phone or tablet that has loads of trip destinations: my students have dived in coral reefs and floated in space stations. There are simply loads to choose from: you'll definitely find one for your subject. The teacher is the expedition leader and chooses what the students will look at. These pictures will appear on their tablets. It works with cardboard and other VR devices but I have only used it with tablets: the children can move their tablet around to look at the 360 degree view. As a teacher you can see where each of your students is looking at as it's labelled like the marauders map on your screen. If you want to draw their attention to something in particular, tap on it and an arrow will appear on all of their screens encouraging them to turn around. The fantastic thing is that not only can you take them to interesting places, there is lots of information there for the teacher to read out as the narrator. It's such a fantastic hook or activity in a lesson and what's more, it's free and easy to use. I thoroughly recommend you try it out. You will need a google account to sign in though.
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I love a theme park! We had my favourite school trip of the year this week: Physics Trip to Thorpe Park! Last year, when I wasn't in charge, it was just a jolly but this year I was determined to make it educational. We went to the science of roller coasters talk, which was actually very good for a GCSE audience and I thoroughly recommend it to other teachers. I also asked the students to download accelerometers for their phones and take data on the rides. The two accelerometers I suggested were Physics Toolbox Accelerometer for Android and Mobile Science Acceleration for IOS but really this would work on any of them. I exported the acceleration data to excel and then plotted graphs. We then discussed that acceleration is in the same direction as the force they feel (F=ma) and they had to guess the roller coaster. The one above is really good because it has all the sinusoidal sections showing the corkscrews (it's collossus-my favourite!) It's quite difficult to ensure that the pupils held their phone exactly vertical (I strapped mine to my arm with a running band) so it's difficult to look at up and down coasters but it's great at picking out circular motion. Which ride is this one?
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