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An audio tour platform for schools lets you put together a route where students listen, look and do something at each stop. You decide which stops to include, which activity belongs to each one and which languages the tour is available in. Students walk the route with their own phones, right in the browser, without anyone having to install an app on school accounts. As a teacher you keep the management in your own hands: you change a stop, publish again and the next lesson’s class walks the new version.
This works for a trip to a museum or a historic town centre, but just as well on your own site, for example with an introduction route through the school building. If you would also like a biology round of the school grounds or a route past the workshops and labs on an open day, you make that a separate, extra tour.
What an audio tour adds to a school trip
On a classic school trip, there’s one guide or one teacher for a group of thirty students. The back row hears half of it and the front row has already moved on. With an audio tour, every student listens to the same recording, at their own pace, with headphones in.
That changes the role of the supervising teacher. You no longer have to tell the story; you walk around, look in on the activities and help the students who get stuck. The content is already fixed and doesn’t change from group to group or day to day.
A second gain is in the preparation. Whatever you record or have voiced once, you use again with every class and every school year.
Activities per stop: turning listening into learning
A stop is more than sound. You can add text, images and video to each stop, and you use that combination to build an activity. A few formats that work well with a class:
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Observation activity. The recording mentions three details in the gallery or the landscape. The student finds them and describes what they see on the worksheet.
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Comparison activity. The stop includes a historical photo or drawing. The student compares it with the situation today.
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Measuring activity. At a nature stop or in a technology room: count, measure or note something on the spot.
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Interview activity. On a company visit or an open day, have students ask a member of staff one question after the recording.
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Choice activity. At the end of the route, the student chooses which stop stayed with them the most and explains why.
Keep the recordings short. A fourteen-year-old won’t stand still and listen for four minutes. One to two minutes per stop, with the activity straight after, keeps the route moving.
You decide the order of listening and doing for each stop. Sometimes you want students to look first and hear the story after; then you put the activity in the stop’s text and refer in the recording to what they’ve just seen.
Working with classes: groups, pace and numbers
A class of thirty that starts at stop 1 all at once is still crowded together at stop 3. Two ways to avoid that:
Spread out the starting points. Divide the class into groups of three or four and have each group start at a different stop. The route then becomes a loop: everyone walks every stop, but in a different order. It does mean each recording has to stand on its own and not refer back to the previous stop.
Spread out the starting times. All groups walk the same order, five minutes apart. Simpler to set up, and you can link the recordings together.
GPS triggers help here: the recording starts automatically when the group reaches the stop. Students don’t have to look up which number goes with which object, and you don’t lose time explaining how it works. Inside a building or on a site without a good signal, you use stop numbers or a QR code at each point.
Allow time for a short introduction at the start: how to open the tour, where to set the volume, what to do if it doesn’t start. Five minutes at the beginning saves thirty separate questions along the way.
Managed by teachers: who changes what
The platform works in the browser, so management doesn’t sit with one person who has the right software on their laptop. In practice, that means:
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A subject teacher updates the texts of their own route.
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The person who set up the route does not have to be present when a colleague wants to change a stop.
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A change goes live as soon as you publish the new version; the next lesson’s class then already walks the new version.
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You don’t have to re-record anything: text-to-speech turns the revised text into a spoken recording with a natural voice.
That last point keeps upkeep light. You correct a wrong date in a recording in the text, not in a recording studio.
Agree within the school who owns which route and who may publish.
Multilingual: students who can’t yet follow the language of the lesson
In a newcomer class, a group of recent arrivals or a class with students who have only been in the country for a year, the language gets in the way of the content. You translate the tour into more than 70 languages and adjust the translation where the automatic version comes out too formal or too literal. Each language gets its own spoken version.
That way a student hears the story in their own language and does the same activity as the rest of the class. For students who struggle with reading, the audio works just as well, by the way: the content gets through without a worksheet having to be read first.
In the school’s own branding
You set the tour’s colours, logo and typography to the school’s branding. That’s more than a cosmetic detail if you also use the route outside lessons, for example on an open day or at a parents’ evening: visitors see the school, not an unfamiliar platform.
How to create your first route
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Choose one route, not five. One trip or one round of the building. By the second route you’ll know the platform.
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Decide on the stops. Six to ten stops is enough for one lesson, including walking and activities.
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Write the recordings. One to two minutes of speaking time per stop, in the tone you use with the class.
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Add the activity for each stop. In the text or image at the stop, so students can find it without paper.
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Switch on the languages you need. Translate, check the translation and have the speech generated.
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Walk the route yourself. Phone in hand, at a student’s pace. This is where you’ll find the stops that are too long and the spots where the signal drops out.
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Test it with one class. After the lesson, ask what was unclear and fix that before the other classes walk it.
Frequently asked questions
Do students need to install an app? No. The tour works right in the browser on the student’s phone. Nothing needs installing and no school accounts or app store permissions are needed.
What if a student doesn’t have a phone? Let students walk in twos or threes, with one phone and a splitter or taking turns with an earbud. That also works well for the activities, because they talk about them.
Can the tour work inside the school building too? Yes. GPS isn’t reliable indoors, so there you use stop numbers or a QR code at each point. The way you set up the stops and activities stays the same.
How long does it take to make a route? That depends mostly on writing the recordings; the technology isn’t the bottleneck. You put it together, translate and publish it in the browser, without needing a developer.
Can several teachers work on the same tour? Yes, the management lives in the platform, not on one computer.
Let’s talk about a route for your school
Want to know what a route for your school trip or your own site would look like? Request a demo or book a free consultation and we’ll go through your stops and activities together.