Digital Field Trip from Digital Frog; a TOS Crew Review

Field trips meant getting out of school when I was in school. My friends and I looked forward to them with great anticipation. My school-building-school children look forward to them with similar anticipation today.

Imagine a field trip that you take without leaving your home or school. Some field trip destinations are too expensive to take. The folks from Digital Frog have come up with a way to bring some field trips to you. For $125, the CD-Rom-Rom home version takes you to three locations: rainforest of Central America, the wetlands of Canada, and deserts around the world. For $60, you can take any one of the field trips.

I had no idea what to expect when my CD arrived. Playing the CD and going on a field trip is as simple as inserting the CD into a computer. You may choose to watch from the disc or to install the information onto your hard drive.

I recommend that viewers choose the "quick tour" option first to learn the format and to learn how to navigate the options. After you've watched the tour, head out of town for a field trip!

Viewers get an in-depth visual tour of the field trip location with some sound. The information is quite thorough, and with the interactive site map, pretty easy to navigate. The photographs are stunning. I have the ability to click and drag the photos around so that I can see them from any perspective. (neat!) There are drawings and maps to help illustrate concepts, and there are occasional quizzes.

The field trips are, for our homeschooling situation, a bit heavy on text. I homeschool a child with delays in areas of reading comprehension who is not ready for the large amount of text. The field trips are not all text. Some photographs are accompanied by an audio description, with similar text on the side. I love the sounds of the rainforest and the sounds of the wetlands in those field trips!

I anticipate our using these more thoroughly as my homeschooler's reading skills mature. For now, we are able to pop in the CD and spend little bits of time learning about one aspect of a field trip at a time, plants in the desert, for example, or an animal. The digital format allows us to move as slowly as we need to for our situation, and sometimes, for us, that means looking at the pictures and avoiding the text as it is written and condensing and summarizing it for a child who is delayed in reading.

Here is a video that spotlights products from Digital Frog:

For other reviews of this product, go HERE.

I received a complimentary copy of Digital Frog as part of my participation in TOS Homeschool Crew; I am not financially compensated for reviews and am not obligated to provide a positive review.