Local school participates in virtual field trips for students

As of now, school field trips are out of the question due to the pandemic. Some students are adapting to online learning due to COVID-19 safety concerns. In the midst of this, students at Southeast Elementary School still have the advantage to learn outside the classroom with virtual trips.

“With virtual field trips, you can actually go anywhere here in America and across the globe. We can go on virtual field trips. It’s actually opened up a lot of different things,” said Southeast Elementary Principal Ryan Powell. “They’ve studied the Statue of Liberty and around the fall, we had pumpkin carvings where the teacher did all the carvings, but the students got to feel the seeds and different things.”

Powell says with this way of learning, it still opens up opportunities for students as it would in a physical standpoint. Virtual trips have been an ongoing tool at the school for the past few years.

“If we have students to go to the zoo, for example, students that don’t get to go to the zoo--when they get to school that day, we let them go virtually. You can’t substitute looking at a giraffe versus seeing it on a computer screen, but at least they get to have that experience.”

Students have even gotten the experience of letting the educational subjects come to them.

“We’ve had some visitors like Mississippi Power and they got to see the boom and all the different things and they were explaining what they do for electricity. They brought in the local fire truck and they were able to spray some water and we also had the garbage truck come in.”

With these outside settings, students are able to follow CDC guidelines while maintaining an interest in learning.