Virtual field trips: a practical guide for teachers

A virtual field trip is a tour through 360 photos of a real place, with explanations pinned exactly where they belong, that the class explores on the classroom display, on Chromebooks or tablets, or in a headset. It doesn’t replace the real trip: it prepares for it, extends it and goes where the school bus can’t. This guide covers where to get the photos, how to structure the tour, how to lead the class live and how to assess, with examples from elementary school to career and technical education.

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What a virtual field trip is actually good for

It’s worth being honest before building anything. A virtual field trip doesn’t smell like a forest and doesn’t have the echo of a cathedral. What it does, and does well, is:

• Prepare for the real trip. Students arrive knowing what they will see, where everything is and which questions to bring. The visit is worth twice as much.
• Revisit calmly. Go back to the museum gallery a week later, stop at the painting everyone walked past, zoom in on the detail.
• Reach the unreachable. A cave with restricted access, a closed dig site, an observatory, a city two thousand miles away, the inside of a power plant.
• Include students who couldn’t go, and students who can’t move around the way others do.
• Assess in place, with questions tied to what students see, not to a separate worksheet.

Where the photos come from

There are three sources, and they combine well:

Source	Advantages	Limits
Wikimedia Commons	Thousands of openly licensed spherical panoramas (mostly CC BY-SA) of landmarks, museums, landscapes and cities worldwide	Uneven coverage; you must credit the author (Andarama keeps the attribution inside the tour)
Your own 360 camera	Photos of exactly the place you want, with the quality and framing you choose	Someone has to go; a mid-range camera costs about as much as a basic projector
The place you visit	Some museums, parks and companies share panoramas for educational use	Case by case; you have to ask

A tip that works: on your next real field trip, bring a 360 camera and take one photo at every stop. Ten minutes of work gives you the virtual field trip for next year, and a way to revisit this year’s.

Photos need to be equirectangular (a 2:1 ratio); if you’re unsure about the format, we explain it in what an equirectangular image is.

How to structure the tour

1. An itinerary, not a photo archive

Order the scenes the way the real visit would go: entrance, gallery 1, gallery 2, courtyard, exit. In Andarama’s graph, each arrow is a link between two scenes, and you set the arrival direction so that entering a room points students at what matters, not at a blank wall. If the building has a floor plan, add it and place each scene on it: visitors get a minimap showing where they are and which way they’re facing.

2. Short, varied explanations pinned in place

The advantage over a video is that the explanation sits right where the thing is. A text hotspot on the column capital, a zoomable image on the fresco, thirty seconds of audio next to the display case, a video projected on the workshop wall. Rule of thumb: fewer than twenty hotspots per scene and one-paragraph texts. Anything longer goes into a linked PDF.

3. Questions where students have to look

Place quiz hotspots along the tour: “How many columns hold up the portico?” can only be answered by looking up. With the gate turned on, the question keeps the student in the scene until they answer correctly; without it, it’s an optional stop. All of this is in the teaching documentation.

4. A guided route for students who get lost

Autopilot mode chains scenes with timed stops so the tour explains itself, which is handy on the classroom display or at a learning station with one tablet.

Leading the tour live

For the first pass with the whole class, a live guided tour works best: the teacher creates a room from the editor, shares the attendee link, and everything they do on their screen (changing scenes, turning the view, zooming) is mirrored on each student’s screen. Alt-click drops a pointer everyone can see, and there’s a text chat. Any student can break away to explore alone and sync back whenever they want.

Voice doesn’t go through the room: in class you just talk, and for remote or hybrid lessons you run Google Meet, Zoom or Teams alongside.

Assessment

With the Classroom plan for teachers, students open the link or scan the QR code, no accounts, which keeps student data privacy simple (no roster stored, less to review under FERPA and COPPA). In the tour Settings you set the passing score, turn on the final report and, if you like, a PDF certificate with the participant’s name that students can submit in Google Classroom or Canvas as evidence.

If your school uses Moodle or another LMS, the tour can go inside a course as a SCORM package, which does report the score (Training plan or self-hosted). In Moodle it can also connect through LTI 1.3, which sends the grade to the gradebook automatically and never needs re-uploading.

Examples by grade

• Grades 2-3: “The farmers market.” Five photos of a local market, a treasure hidden at each stall (the seasonal fruit, the scale) and questions about weights, prices and where each product comes from.
• Grades 4-5: “The mission” or “the fort.” Panoramas of a historic site in your state, floating labels naming the parts of the building, an audio clip at each stop and a final quiz.
• Middle school: “The water treatment plant.” Photos from a real visit, with the process explained step by step in each scene and a comparison slider of the water coming in and going out.
• High school: “The city museum.” Wikimedia Commons panoramas, three themed routes (Autopilot) and a twenty-question quiz spread across the galleries with a passing score.
• Career and technical education: “The production floor.” The partner company’s plant, with each workstation explained by its own technicians in audio and the safety rules as gated quizzes. It’s also the format we suggest for workplace training.

With headsets, if you have them

The same tour opens in VR headsets from their browser (Meta Quest, Pico), and panels and quizzes work inside the session; on a phone, there’s cardboard mode. It’s not essential: the whole visit works on the classroom display and on tablets. On when headsets are worth buying, we wrote VR in education without buying headsets. And if you want to turn the same photos into a game, see how to build a digital escape room.

Where to start

A five-scene virtual field trip with a few texts and three questions takes an afternoon. The getting started guide walks through the whole flow in about fifteen minutes, and if your district prefers not to depend on anyone, the software is open source and can be installed on a school computer for free.

Try Andarama free for 14 days and plan your first trip this week.