The Sydney Jewish Museum is Virtual Excursions Australia’s newest content provider. The Sydney Jewish Museum is an institution that gives history a voice through collecting and preserving historic objects, commemorating and educating, with a mission to challenge visitors’ perceptions of morality, social justice, democracy and human rights.
History LIVE: Behind the scenes with a curator
Have you ever wondered about all the different artefacts in a museum? Did you know that not all of them are on display at the same time? Behind the scenes, many more artefacts are waiting to tell their stories.
Ever wondered about the Jewish festival of Chanukah? What do the candles represent and what is a dreidel? Candles, dreidels and even fried foods are all important parts of the Jewish festival of lights, Chanukah! This year Chanukah, which is celebrated over 8 nights, will begin in late November.
Sydney Jewish Museum has a range of program to engage your students virtually in an interactive workshop. Benefit from the expertise and experience of our team of educators to create an engaging, thought-provoking experience for your students.
The Sydney Jewish Museum offers free curriculum-linked teaching resources underpinned by rigorous research and expert subject knowledge. Discover a range of lesson plans, videos, worksheets and activities available for you to download and incorporate into your classroom.
Many of our resources offer a sneak peak behind the scenes of the Museum to discover a range of case studies, videos, objects and images that will help you bring history to life for your students.
Plant your History at Elizabeth Farm is a live, online virtual excursion. Students have the opportunity to explore the shared history of the Burramattagal people and European settlers on Darug Country, at the site of Elizabeth Farm in Parramatta, one of Australia’s oldest colonial/European residences.
FREE event on Thu 27 May 2021 at 2pm
Inquiry question
How important is Country to Aboriginal peoples and what ongoing impact has the arrival of settlers had on Aboriginal people and Country.
Curriculum links
Science
ST1-5LW-T identifies how plants and animals are used for food and fibre products
ST2-5LW-T describes how agricultural processes are used to grow plants and raise animals for food, clothing and shelter
Geography
GE1-1 describes features of places and the connections people have with places
GE1-2 identifies ways in which people interact with and care for places
GE2-2 describes the ways people, places and environments interact
GE2-3 examines differing perceptions about the management of places and environments
GE3-2 explains interactions and connections between people, places and environments
History
HT2.4 describes and explains effects of British colonisation in Australia
The education team at Sydney Olympic Park authority jumped into online delivery of their programs this year, with great results.
Field Based Virtual Excursions
Virtual Excursions exploring the Badu wetlands at Sydney Olympic Park have enabled students to experience a fieldwork session without leaving the classroom. Having these excursion available as live online sessions has also opened up their audience to schools that haven’t been able to attend onsite due to distance.
During the year 105 kindy to year 12 classes were delivered online, totalling 3150 students.
In 2020 the Youth Eco Summit (YES) went virtual. The primary school program had a wide range of presenters delivering workshop or large scale shows. This program also involved upskills presenters creating new content providers for the future. The primary and secondary events were a great success and had 1560 students across both events.
MURAMA Youth Event
Murama Indigenous Youth Summit is a resilience-based cultural intervention program which is based on the strengths of Aboriginal culture that aims to heal our communities. The program focuses on belonging, kinship and traditional values as the stepping stones in a right of passage to reweave the cultural connectedness between individuals, families, and the community.
This year the event was delivered differently. 450 students from 15 schools participate in online workshops and 100 students in the the Murama Youth event.
Operation Art
The Operation Art Exhibition was on display in the Armory Gallery at Sydney Olympic Park.
This year they offered virtual art-making lessons to class groups of primary school across NSW. Students were taken on a virtual tour of the exhibition through the eyes of the camera and then participated in an interactive art-making lesson with artist and teacher, Trevor McDonald. 21 classes participated in the online programs reaching 630 students.
Utilising digital technology allowed these wonderful programs to still go ahead in 2020 reaching almost 6000 students. It has been a very challenging year for students, teachers and education organisations and virtual excursions have enable us all to stay connected.
Due to the success of these engaging programs the team at Sydney Olympic Park Authority will continue to offer virtual excursions in 2021.
The Sydney Olympic Park Education team offer their K-12 Geography, Science & History LIVE Virtual Excursion Experiences. These unique K-12 syllabus linked Geography, Science and History Virtual Excursions are hosted live on site in the inter-tidal wetlands and in the Sydney Olympic Park urban centre.
The duration is 2 hours for years 7-12 and 45-60 minutes for K-6 programs. They can also customise a program to suit your students needs. Visit their website to see the full suite of programs on offer at Sydney Olympic Park for 2021.
Sydney Living Museums has been running Virtual Excursions for many years. They have some great program to support your students learning in 2020.
COOKING UP THE PAST
During this virtual program students connect live with a museum educator and explore how food was grown, stored and cooked in the past, in the 1820s kitchen at historic Vaucluse House. During the early years of the New South Wales colony, this grand house was the home of the Wentworth family and their many servants.
Students are introduced to the Wentworth family and their ten children. They think about how the way we grow, store, prepare and eat our food today is similar or different to the way this was done in the past. They will see what’s growing the kitchen garden; investigate how technologies for preparing food have changed from the 19th century to today in the kitchen and dairy; and learn how to make butter, so they can make their own and find out how good it tastes on a piece of bread.
In this new virtual excursion, your Stage 2 class will connect live with a museum educator and learn about how convicts lived and worked at the Hyde Park Barracks in the early 19th century.
Students will examine a range of historical sources, including the World Heritage-listed building, and investigate some of the work done by the male convicts who lived at the Hyde Park Barracks. Students will see how the bricks from which the Barracks was built were made by hand; and find clues left behind by convict brick makers.
Australian National Maritime Museum is hosting a Pirate School for young pirate recruits. Learn how to become a pirate with the museum’s own resident pirate Grognose Johnny – he’s even set some homework activities for the young sea squirts!
Explore our newly developed series of online resources for students, teachers and parents, to help guide students’ learning while they’re away from the classroom. With subjects suitable for Early, Primary and Secondary learners, these resources have been created to engage students and guide further activity on the topics.
We will be continually adding to this page in the coming months as we create more immersive learning opportunities for students at home.
Whilst understanding how to use a camera and microphone during a live online program is essential, choosing additional content to interact with can make all the difference to the engagement of your audience. Thankfully many of the web conferencing tools have screen sharing capability, which means that you can share extra content that both help support your lesson and breaks up the monotony of a constant video of you as a ‘talking head’!
The following only briefly touches on the huge variety of options to things to share on-screen, as in reality what you can share is only limited by your creativity. What’s more, as long as you control the child safety aspects of your meeting, you can also have your attendees share their screen too which means the interactivity increases even further.
Whiteboard sharing for the win
A screen capture from full desktop sharing of Adobe Photoshop – Fizzics Education
Many of the web conferencing software have a whiteboard function. This means you can quickly draw on diagrams on the fly as you speak to them. There is even the option in some cases for multiple people to be able to draw onto the whiteboard at the same time. If your conferencing software doesn’t have a whiteboard function, you can screen share Microsoft Paint, Adobe Photoshop and other applications which will produce the same effect. You can also save the images and share them afterwards too!
Connect peripheral devices to share
Using a USB Digital Microscope to look underneath a fern – Fizzics Education
Your peripheral devices that you routinely use might well be fascinating to your remote audience! For example, not everyone can get USB powered digital microscopes easily. Why not share their images live? Simply power-up your digital microscope and then screen share the results! If you do some testing, sometimes you can find that the digital microscope camera is recognised by the web conferencing app itself, which means you can simply toggle between your camera and the microscope. There are also converters which allow your analogue microscope to share the images digitally too, a great way to microscopic organisms in more detail. Think about what device you have at your site that could be shared during your conference.
Use data logging live in your conference
Wouldn’t it be great to share live experiment results? Well, with screen sharing you can! There are plenty of data logging apps out there that you can be shared over a remote connection. One of the ones that Fizzics Education uses is Science Journal. It’s a data logging app by Google that uses the sensors in your smartphone or tablet to perform experiments! Record sound levels, magnetism, light levels, acceleration and much more. Very handy for your remote audience to see measurements in real-time of your experiment, plus you can pull the data file and share it to your audience either during the conference or afterwards as well.
Connect people together by sharing
Remote connections can often feel like a barrier for sharing experiences. Why not consider having your audience share what they are experiencing from their location? In early April 2020, Fizzics Education organised a Supermoon party, where people from Japan, the Philippines and Australia all were involved in sharing what they were seeing live during the event. Because of timezone differences, people were able to see that not all of us were able to experience the Supermoon rise at the same time, plus it opened up a chance to discuss about different cultures & locations as well.
Use visual apps that enrich your live content There are so many science apps available these days! If you connect your device to your web conference, there is no reason why you can’t share some of this content if it is already available for free. You can share virtual skies, explore the human body, play science games and more! As long as your app fits well within your conference, we say go for it!
These were just some brief ways that you can use screen sharing to enhance remote learning. Some extra tips to consider.
Only have the tabs open on your browser that you are happy to share! You may not wan to share everything that is on your desktop
To control what you share even further, only choose the application that you want to share instead of the whole screen.
Turn off desktop notifications & reminders that you might normally receive during the day
Be aware of internet bandwidth. If you are sharing a rich HD moving image, this may not show up as well for your remote audience if their internet is not high speed.
If you are sharing apps, have them preloaded and ready to go on the screen that you need.
If you use screen mirroring to your device, there is a lag in connecting to the conference that you will need to adjust for.
Practice and test! Make sure you know how connect to your extra content easily.
So, are you ready to give it a go? When it s comes down to it, it just a matter of thinking carefully about how the extra content impacts upon your overall presentation.With these tips and mind and little creativity, your remote audiences will love your line online programs!
Virtual Excursions and online learning is now the new normal. Join us to find out just what is available for schools, libraries, community groups and more. There are a lot of incredible live interactive classes that are educational, linked with curriculum and engaging.
Hosted by Ben Newsome from Fizzics Education
Keep and eye out for upcoming events for World Environment Day 5 June and SciFest for during August
The Sydney Olympic Park Authority (SOPA) Education Unit delivers curriculum based school excursion programs and events to over 30,000 K-12 school students annually. These programs focus on Geography, Science, History and cross-curriculum priorities of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander History and Cultures and Sustainability.
Virtual Excursion at Sydney Olympic Parks. Exploring the Badu wetlands. Park Live will enable your students to join in fieldwork sessions.
Our suite of place-based school excursions are (usually!) experiential, immersive, hands-on learning opportunities that share our unique story of sustainable development, environmental conservation and heritage management across the Parklands, urban township and Heritage Precincts of Sydney Olympic Park. We also have annual marquee education events, the Primary and Secondary Youth Eco Summits (YES) which involve more than 40 partnering organisations.
As a response to the service delivery challenges we are facing with customers unable to attend school excursions, SOPA currently has live-streaming virtual excursions and customised resource packages for teachers in rapid development. From next week under the mantle of ‘Park Live’ these interactive programs will enable classes and/or individual students to connect directly to our educators in the wetlands using Zoom conferencing. Here is a glimpse of a what the students will be involved in during a live-streamed virtual excursion in their classrooms. They will be able to interact with the SOPA Educator and any other presenter partners that we have joining the virtual excursion. This video clip is starring one of our casual Educators Tom who also runs nature based public tours with his company “Hooked on Nature”.
Where possible we will engage other partners and industry experts to enhance each live-stream session. Our next steps will be to extend this approach to our heritage programs, technical tours, ArtExpress at the Armory and courses for Wetland professionals. We will then look at the potential for interactive live-stream models to deliver our YES events out to schools. We have immense pride in our place as a huge outdoor classroom and will continue to connect people safely to our programs and resources however we can. If you want to partner in this or simply talk through the technical aspects of the approach please contact mike.bartlett@sopa.nsw.gov.au or danielle.leggo@sopa.nsw.gov.au.
Multi-award-winning virtual programs by Fizzics Education are available to all students to keep up student enthusiasm & enrichment in these unprecedented times. These virtual excursions are available to your school now, no matter your location across Australia and the world.
Liquid Nitrogen Video Conference
Fizzics Education has been running live virtual classes with students since 2011. Their programs are highly interactive distance lessons by highly experienced distance educators including:
Direct curriculum links
Live classes; students can question & answer our educators and participate in experiments using household materials
Pre, during and post virtual excursion lesson notes for both teachers and students.
A list of inexpensive materials that students can have on-hand during the lesson.
Option to use Flipgrid to help students discuss the content further
Simple connection, one click and you’re in!
All supported by over 150 FREE experiments, student podcasts and more
We know that this may not be part of your scope and sequence yet, however these virtual excursions are a direct solution for keeping students focused and connected with the online content that you are preparing.
Contact Fizzics Education now to find out more and secure your booking!
This post by Ben form Fizzics Education has a video and radio interview discussing the video conferencing.
This video covers the variety of educational virtual excursion festivals available for schools arranged by Virtual Excursions Australia. VEA is a network of museums, galleries, libraries, environmental centres, aquariums & more.
As you can see, there are so many opportunities available for schools, libraries, hospitals, remand centers and more to engage learners with real time learning with subject matter experts via video conference. It’s so easy these days! By the way, the interviewer was Jan Zanetis who is the Managing Director the Centre for Interactive Learning & Collaboration and a current International Society for Technology in Education board member.
You might like to find out more about events & learning festivals being conducted Virtual Excursions Australia and the work being done to reach remote learners via web and video conference! Also you might also like to know more about the Churchill Fellowship on best practice in science education via video conference I completed last year and it’s associated findings for Australian educators.
Ben from Fizzics Education connected with Unalaska library to run a video conference on the science of sound. As usual I had a blast working with the kids, but I got a great surprise to find that it got recorded by local community radio station kucb 89.7fm!
Video conferencing offers the opportunity to enrich regional and remote communities throughout the world. If your school or cultural organisation has the bandwidth and the hardware, why not consider running some connections to overseas sites? All you need is to do is to get in contact with a school or library district that uses virtual excursions and simply coordinate time zones using a time and date converter. The local connection time in Sydney was not an issue as the connection was after school hours for the library and this worked out to be 11:00am AEST… much more manageable than the 5:00am connections that sometimes need to happen for sites on the east coast of the USA!
