Virtual Tours? Why not!

The days are getting longer and warmer, and more and more difficult to focus on the lesson, especially if you’re still working online. I’ve been working from home for years now, so I know how important it is to move a bit, go for a short walk and just enjoy the weather, but, well, we’re still in a kind of lockdown (as our prime minister said more than a year ago let’s survive those two weeks… and we’ve been trying to survive it for the next 60 weeks). Moreover, taking a walk in an online lesson is quite difficult to organise, not to mention the risk of not the returning to the online classroom.

However, we are not alone, as there are people who realise it’s quite difficult to stay in – and some of those people have actually done some good thinking and now we can visit some pretty interesting sites and take our students to a proper museum for some nice lessons. And the best thing: we can do this for free!

My kind of tours!

The British Museum

The British Museum is famous for its queues… and, right, the collection of stolen artefacts, but we’re here to see them, so don’t mention that. Now we can enjoy the abundance of historical objects without leaving comfortable armchairs, so there’s one of those silver linings of covid-19. The exhibition is divided into five sections:

• art and design
• living and dying
• power and identity
• religion and belief
• trade and conflict

You can navigate through various periods of time and areas to see and learn about many interesting things. When you click on the object, you will see a picture of the object, its description along with audio recording, a map where the object was found and other related objects:

The Louvre

I couldn’t leave the British Museum without showing what the Louvre has to offer. The thing that surprised me the most is that when it comes to virtual tours and activities not everything is in French! That’s really good info for people like me, who can’t say a word in French. So, what can we see in the Louvre? First of all, we have two options: virtual tours and Louvre at home.

Virtual tours simply take you on some selected themed tours where you can feel pretty much like in an actual museum:

On the other hand, Louvre at home gives you more interesting options like podcasts and events (those are only in French though), kids zone and Mona Lisa VR experience. To tell you the truth, I really enjoyed the kids’ section:

You will find there not only gallery, but also 5 stories about Napoleon Bonaparte and his expedition to Egypt, and some summer tales – something you can easily use in your classroom!

Van Gogh Museum

I must admit I really enjoy the art by Van Gogh and I really appreciate the opportunity of enjoying his museum while drinking coffee and listening to music (in my case Troels Hammer), especially that it’s one of the most friendly online museums ever.

Of course, it’s easy to focus on the rich collection, but you can use a lot of resources in your classroom – and the kids zone is just brilliant, I love the diorama, puzzles and audiobook. The best thing is, almost all these materials are in English, which makes it really easy to use in your classroom.

I hope you’ll enjoy the tours I recommend – even if you won’t use them in your classroom, you can still spend some time visiting various interesting places.

Enjoy!