Google Expeditions Transports Roxbury History Students to Louisiana

Students experience Google Expeditions in the classroom Credits: Roxbury High School

ROXBURY, NJ - Roxbury High School students in Conor Devine’s U.S. History I class took a virtual field trip last week to the Whitney Plantation in Wallace, Louisiana thanks to the use of Google Expedition goggles.

Devine planned his lesson to coincide with the study of early sectional differences between the North and the South in the early- to mid-1800s. These differences were economic, social and political. One theme that connected each of these differences was slavery.

Google Expeditions provided a full tour of the Whitney Plantation in which students could put on Virtual Reality goggles and see a 360-degree view of the plantation fields, slave quarters, the “big house” and an original Antioch Baptist church.

Students were taken on this journey by co-teachers Caty Gluck and Kate Oster who narrated each of the scenes they were viewing through the googles and asked differentiated questions about specific aspects of each scene.

“Google Expeditions brought this topic to life for our students in a way that lecturing and reading could never do,” said Devine.

Google Expeditions was selected for this lesson after a recent professional development workshop provided during PLC time by Director of Technology Teresa Rehman and Arcangelo Iurato, district computer technician.

“After learning about the options and how to operate the technology we realized that this would be an excellent resource for our students," Devine said "Students were fully engaged in the lesson and immediately wanted to know when they could use them again.”