Explorable Places: Find and Organize Field Trips for K-12 Students in NYC

Explorable Places is a free web app that is designed to help K-12 teachers find field trips.  The resource is currently available for use in NYC, but the team will be expanding to other cities in the future.  For those teachers living in NYC, it’s an excellent resource for finding curricular-aligned field trips within your neighborhood and across the city.

And for those destinations that have partnered with Explorable Places you can even book your trip from right within the app. Let’s take a look!

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When you first sign into Explorable Places you can hit the big, green, Find Field Trips Around New York button to get started.

From there, you’ll be able to search for local field trips by subject area and topic, grade level, activity, cost, accommodations, or you can just use the map to search geographically.
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One of my favorite things about Explorable Places is that the site isn’t just focused on museums, but instead offers an enormous range of field trip possibilities including parks, labs, arts centers, and so much more.  All the museums are there as well of course, but just the giant range of possibilities is wonderful to see.

You can also use the Book Online filter at the top left to find those organizations who have partnered with Explorable Places and will allow you to book your field trip directly through the site. Those that haven’t partnered with Explorable Places will redirect to you the booking page for the respective organization.

Each field trip destination also offers a detailed description of the location, hours, types of activities, lunch notes, and bathroom notes.  This makes it incredibly easy for teachers to see exactly what they’re getting into before they start trying to book a field trip.
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Many of the field trip options also offer a variety of different activities and trips, depending on your subject area and grade level.  Those trips that offer these possibilities will have them listed below the description and general information.  

​Clicking on Book Now (for those that offer online booking) will also open a calendar to let you choose from the organization’s upcoming availability.  This is also where you would enter your basic class information before confirming your booking.

Once you have a trip booked, you’ll get a confirmation email from the destination.  From this point on, you’ll be able to communicate with the organization via email, rather than having to login to the app to check and see if you have any notifications.  I’m a big fan of this approach, rather than having teachers always have to check back into another service that they might not be using on a regular basis.

You’ll also be able to see your pending requests and your upcoming trips from your profile.  From here, you can edit your trips in case you need to change the number of students who are coming, or anything along those lines.  

Overall, I really love Explorable Places!  My only complaint is that it’s not currently available in other cities yet.  But the service Explorable Places is offering is incredibly valuable and for a completely free app, it has a lot to offer.  It’s easy to find a trip based on any number of factors, and the wonderful variety of field trip locations is great to see.   

I realize that costs may be prohibitive for a lot of schools, and that’s why I think it’s good to see so many trips that are free.  I also realize that transportation is always an issue to consider, and hopefully using the map to search can allow teachers to find field trip destinations that are close and more easily accessible.

In short, if you’re a teacher living in NYC, I absolutely recommend giving Explorable Places a try.  It’s a wonderful, user-friendly resource that offers a lot of possibility for finding and booking new field trip destinations.

The opinions expressed in this review are my own.
I was not compensated for writing this review.