National Geographic is a beloved channel many tune in to watch. I know when I was younger, I would watch it all the time. Well, this beloved channel has now made another great educational tool called Explorer Classroom!

https://www.nationalgeographic.org/tickets/explorer-classroom/?page=1

Explorer Classroom creates interactive sessions with experts in several different fields of work and study; scientists, researchers and storytellers are all included within these experts. One of the beautiful things about this is that it’s completely free and open to the public. Explorer Classrooms works on a schedule; Mondays at 11am is for ages 4-8 and Thursdays at 10am and 2pm for 9-14. In exploring the schedule for this month, I noticed there was a nice range of subjects such as bats, plastic pollution and elephant seals.

Upon discovering this amazing platform, I started watching a few of the already recorded sessions. My favorite was the ‘Tour a Conservation Station with Andy Whitworth’. During this session, they explored a conservation station in Costa Rica. They talked with different teams that were doing their own projects and research. After the experts explained their studies, they took questions. Questions were brought in both live via zoom and over the YouTube chat. Even as an adult, I thoroughly enjoyed the content and learned a ton.

Explorer Classroom is a great tool to get students to readily learn and explore the world around them. The interactive potential was amazing to see. I’d definitely use it in my own classrooms when approaching a subject, or perhaps just as a great educational downtime.