Educator Workshop: Creating Virtual Field Experiences

This winter, Maryland Department of Natural Resources, the NOAA Chesapeake Bay Office, and the American Geosciences Institute are partnering to offer the "Virtual Field Experiences: Creating Immersive Opportunities for Exploring and Investigating Our Environment" workshop. This is a six-session online workshop for environmental educators interested in developing and supporting virtual, place-based environmental education experiences during COVID-19 and beyond. The "train the trainer" workshop will provide participants with the knowledge, experience, training, and tools necessary for facilitating effective workshops for educators and engaging virtual experiences for students.

This workshop will support participants in the following ways:

• Engaging with the principles of Place-Based Learning and Meaningful Watershed Education Experiences (MWEEs)
• Hands-on practice with virtual field experience resources (using Google Tour Creator, ESRI Story Maps and Google Earth Projects)
• Applications of digital media and environmental data in environmental literacy programming
• Upon completion of the workshop, participants will have developed a customized virtual field experience

Format:

• Six online sessions (1.5 hours each)
• Wednesday mornings (9:00 a.m.-10:30 a.m.) in December 2020 (2, 9, 16) and January 2021 (6, 13, 20)

Logistics:

• This workshop is free, but spots are limited. Please sign up for the workshop soon.
• We recommend that organizations send a “team” of two to three individuals.
• The Maryland Department of Natural Resources is providing financial support for this workshop, so preference will be given to Maryland educators. However, we anticipate having spots available for teams outside Maryland, so we encourage educators from throughout the watershed to sign up for the workshop.

Want to learn more about virtual tours? Get an introduction to this workshop facilitation team and the Google Tour platform.