New Trends in Educational Travel Invite Students to Get Social
By: Erin Bowen
In an age of status updates, texting and tweets, students expect to engage and connect with the world around them. They wake up to text messages from friends and they fall asleep to wall posts on Facebook. For teachers, capturing and maintaining the attention of a classroom full of teenagers with iPhones and Blackberries can be as difficult as learning how to edit a comment on Twitter. In fact, you can’t edit a comment on Twitter.
Student travel companies know that in order to provide a well-rounded educational experience overseas in 2010 and beyond, tour itineraries must now incorporate meaningful and engaging activities for teachers and students to actively participate in together. The travel industry is also staying on top of the latest social media trends so that students and even teachers can easily share these unique experiences with people back home.
In between sightseeing, meals and museum visits, a new trend is emerging within the student travel industry: interactive activities. Interactive activities allow teachers and students to dive deeper into the places and cultures they visit. They not only get the opportunity to admire Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling in Rome, they participate in fresco workshops led by a local expert in which they create their own works of art inspired by the famous artist and the Renaissance era. In Paris, students marvel at the Eiffel Tower and then stroll over to the picturesque Jardin du Luxembourg to learn the game and strategies of pétanque (France’s answer to bocce) with a member of the French National Federation of Pétanques. In Buenos Aires, students visit a working gaucho ranch where they feast on a traditional meal of criollas before watching a folklore show and riding horseback with a real life gaucho. Interactions such as these engage and grab hold of students, and thus help to create a more meaningful and lively overseas experience.
These activities change the landscape of educational travel and learning. First, the hands-on activities heighten the experience for both teachers and students because instead of engaging one or two senses, students utilize all five senses. Students employ the sense of smell when they visit a perfume factory in the south of France, they use their sense of touch when they learn to play a tune on the bagpipe during a lesson in Scotland, they engage their sense of taste when they partake in a strudel making and tasting in Hungary, they use their sense of sound when they conduct a simulated orchestra at the Haus der Musik in Austria, and they always engage their sense of sight throughout the tour, but specifically when they carefully study their dance instructor’s moves during a flamenco lesson in Spain.
Second, these activities allow students to interact with each other and with the locals. Learning abroad is no longer a one-way street of lectures. Many tours will still include traditional sightseeing and museum visits with expert guides who provide commentary, but students will also participate in cultural activities that allow them to interact with locals on a personal level. For instance, when a group tours China, they may partake in a cultural exchange with students from Shanghai. During this exchange, American teachers and students spend a day at a school in Shanghai in which they will converse, communicate, and learn alongside local pupils.
When planning an educational tour abroad, teachers should be aware that these types of learning activities exist, typically at no extra cost, and are usually built directly into pre-existing itineraries. When selecting a destination and itinerary, educators need to ask the right questions: How can my students benefit from such activities? What background information needs to be provided to me so that we can maximize our time spent during these activities? How many activities are included during our tour? Approximately how long are the activities? Are these activities good for high school students, middle school students and adults?
While these culturally enticing opportunities allow teachers and students to be more hands-on in the countries they visit, companies are aware that many on tour will still crave a virtual connection with people back home. Student travel companies make that connection easy by creating and maintaining corporate Facebook pages, YouTube pages, Flickr pages, Twitter pages, and even tour diary tools.
Tour diary tools are steadily gaining popularity and generating a lot of buzz within the industry and combine media that students are familiar with from photos to videos to short text updates and even geographical location tagging. Students and teachers can use this tool during or after a trip. While on tour, a student can partake in a Shakespeare workshop at the famous Globe Theater and interact with local thespians and then upload photos and descriptions to her tour diary page from her smart phone on the bus ride back to the hotel in London. After the tour, a teacher can just as easily upload his pictures from his digital camera to his tour diary to share the experiences with other teachers, his circle of friends, and members of his community. These tools connect family members back home to the trip in real-time, allow students to fulfill their craving to participate in social media on tour, and lastly, provide a vivid record of the trip for potential future travelers.
In this “always-on, get me connected quickly” decade, student travel companies are responding to the challenge of supporting today’s teachers and technically savvy students. By mixing new technologies with the increasingly novel idea of engaging with people face-to-face, educational travel is offering travelers the best of both worlds.
Erin Bowen is a marketing manager at ACIS Educational Tours, www.acis.com.
