Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. News

Digital Trends may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site. Why trust us?

Virtual learning: How to keep your kids engaged while they’re off from school

Allison Matyus
By

The COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak has caused restaurants, bars, museums, schools, and more to close down to prevent the rapid spread of the virus. Many kids are home from school these next few weeks, but that doesn’t mean they have to pause educational and interactive learning. There are plenty of sites and apps offering virtual field trips, interactive tools, and even remote trips to space.  

Here are some virtual ways you can keep your kids learning despite the closing of schools. 

Recommended Videos
This article is part of our continuing series, School’s out: How we learn in the age of coronavirus
The rapid spread of the coronavirus, formally known as COVID-19, caused school districts, colleges, and universities to shut down and move all classes online with very little notice. Millions of students and parents suddenly have to deal with the new reality of remote learning.
why the coronavirus could remake school as we know it schools out education module hero v3

Go to the zoo

The Cincinnati Zoo, home of Fiona the hippopotamus, is posting a “Home Safari Facebook Live” every weekday at 3 p.m. ET (noon PST) starting this week. The virtual event will highlight one of the zoo’s animals each day and will even include an activity for kids to do at home. 

The San Diego zoo also has live cams of various animal exhibits, including penguins, pandas, koala bears, giraffes, tigers, and more. 

Visit a museum 

Museums are getting in on the virtual reality action too. Renowned museums around the world are offering virtual tours for those stuck at home. 

The  Louvre museum in Paris offers virtual tours for some of its exhibits, including remains of the Louvre’s Moat and the Galerie d’Apollon. 

The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History also offers a wide array of virtual tours of its current exhibits, with glimpses into its Butterfly Pavilion, the David H. Koch Hall of Fossils, and the Janet Annenberg Hooker Hall of Geology, Gems, and Minerals. 

Google Arts & Culture has also teamed up with more than 500 museums from around the world to bring their exhibits online. Collections from museums such as the British Museum in London, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam are available to view for free. 

Learn at home

Scholastic has launched a free “Learn at Home” program for students out of school during the coronavirus outbreak. The program has daily courses for pre-K and kindergarten, as well as students in grades one through six. 

Some of the things kids can expect to learn in the program include physical science, social studies, and even how emojis are engineered. There will also be virtual field trips.

Explore outer space 

For aspiring astronauts, NASA is offering virtual tours of its Glenn Research Center facilities, including the Glenn Hanger and the Hubble Telescope Control Center. 

NASA TV also offers regular programming such as live interviews with astronauts on board the International Space Station, spacewalks, rocket launches, and more. There’s a schedule of all upcoming live events on NASA TV. 

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Allison Matyus
Allison Matyus
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Allison Matyus is a general news reporter at Digital Trends. She covers any and all tech news, including issues around social…
Why AI will never rule the world
image depicting AI, with neurons branching out from humanoid head

Call it the Skynet hypothesis, Artificial General Intelligence, or the advent of the Singularity -- for years, AI experts and non-experts alike have fretted (and, for a small group, celebrated) the idea that artificial intelligence may one day become smarter than humans.

According to the theory, advances in AI -- specifically of the machine learning type that's able to take on new information and rewrite its code accordingly -- will eventually catch up with the wetware of the biological brain. In this interpretation of events, every AI advance from Jeopardy-winning IBM machines to the massive AI language model GPT-3 is taking humanity one step closer to an existential threat. We're literally building our soon-to-be-sentient successors.

Read more
The best hurricane trackers for Android and iOS in 2022
Truck caught in gale force winds.

Hurricane season strikes fear into the hearts of those who live in its direct path, as well as distanced loved ones who worry for their safety. If you've ever sat up all night in a state of panic for a family member caught home alone in the middle of a destructive storm, dependent only on intermittent live TV reports for updates, a hurricane tracker app is a must-have tool. There are plenty of hurricane trackers that can help you prepare for these perilous events, monitor their progress while underway, and assist in recovery. We've gathered the best apps for following storms, predicting storm paths, and delivering on-the-ground advice for shelter and emergency services. Most are free to download and are ad-supported. Premium versions remove ads and add additional features.

You may lose power during a storm, so consider purchasing a portable power source,  just in case. We have a few handy suggestions for some of the best portable generators and power stations available. 

Read more
Don’t buy the Meta Quest Pro for gaming. It’s a metaverse headset first
Meta Quest Pro enables 3D modeling in mixed reality.

Last week’s Meta Connect started off promising on the gaming front. Viewers got release dates for Iron Man VR, an upcoming Quest game that was previously a PS VR exclusive, as well as Among Us VR. Meta, which owns Facebook, also announced that it was acquiring three major VR game studios -- Armature Studio, Camouflaj Team, and Twisted Pixel -- although we don’t know what they’re working on just yet.

Unfortunately, that’s where the Meta Connect's gaming section mostly ended. Besides tiny glimpses and a look into fitness, video games were not the show's focus. Instead, CEO Mark Zuckerberg wanted to focus on what seemed to be his company’s real vision of VR's future, which involves a lot of legs and a lot of work with the Quest Pro, a mixed reality headset that'll cost a whopping $1,500.

Read more