Catlin Tucker's blog post about her implementation of an Instagram scavenger hunt during a class field trip to Chinatown offers an insightful view on how modern social media can be applied in an educational setting in an engaging way. I could definitely see myself implementing a tool such as this on field trips.
The unfortunate thing is that there is a lack of sites in this area that would be suitable for an engaging high school social studies field trip. I can imagine countless opportunities for a field trip to historical sites in the Eastern U.S. or the Bay Area to utilize this scavenger hunt format, but in the suburban desert, it does not appear to be as ready an option. If California history were a required class in our public high schools, then yes, there would be number of options in San Diego County for field trips related to that, but with the current limitations of world history, U.S. history and American government, there's less that can be applied, since this is an area that has only really been developed within the last 20 years. The USS Iowa Museum in Los Angeles is one possibility that I could think of (a visit to the USS Yorktown when I was younger was a major part of my path to becoming a history teacher), and the San Diego Zoo is one of my favorite places in the world (but hard to justify from a social studies perspective). I do believe in the educational value of field trips and I'll have to think about this idea more depending on where I end up teaching.
The unfortunate thing is that there is a lack of sites in this area that would be suitable for an engaging high school social studies field trip. I can imagine countless opportunities for a field trip to historical sites in the Eastern U.S. or the Bay Area to utilize this scavenger hunt format, but in the suburban desert, it does not appear to be as ready an option. If California history were a required class in our public high schools, then yes, there would be number of options in San Diego County for field trips related to that, but with the current limitations of world history, U.S. history and American government, there's less that can be applied, since this is an area that has only really been developed within the last 20 years. The USS Iowa Museum in Los Angeles is one possibility that I could think of (a visit to the USS Yorktown when I was younger was a major part of my path to becoming a history teacher), and the San Diego Zoo is one of my favorite places in the world (but hard to justify from a social studies perspective). I do believe in the educational value of field trips and I'll have to think about this idea more depending on where I end up teaching.