Skip to main content

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

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. 

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

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…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more