Virtual Tours to Religious and Spiritual Sites
Working together, CDEC and Cumbria SACRE have pulled together a rich collection of virtual tours of religious and spiritual sites to help RE teachers and students discover more about faith. The places included range from those in Cumbria, to fantastic examples further a field. There are also ideas for helping your pupils search for and explore other sites too.
CDEC are supporting Cumbria SACRE in this endeavour by hosting this rich resource. The virtual tools are also a useful tool to use with CDEC's resource boxes.
If you have any recommendations of great virtual tours, please let us know. Thank you!
Virtual tour categories
Researching places of worship near you
A simple project for your students to take on is to use the Internet to research places of worship. They can use Google Maps or platforms like What’s Near Me to find spiritual sites in their local area or other places. Some places have virtual tours within Google Maps, so look out for these.
Ask them to try Googling ‘virtual tours’ of a specific place of worship, for example a church, mosque, gurdwara, synagogue, temple or sacred space (eg a stone circle). Some places of worship have their own website with photographs of the building and special features, which can give a good impression of what it is like inside and the atmosphere that exists within the building or site.
There are also websites with search engines for a specific place of worship (see below). In these times of the pandemic, many places of worship are offering virtual opportunities to attend worship.