A gust of wind, salty and moist, blusters through the computer lab at Quest Academy. Building-high waves crash across a projector screen at the front of the room and lightning — produced with a quick flip of the room's overhead lights — strikes. Thirty second-graders squeal as the storm tosses their butcher paper and PVC pipe version of the Mayflower from swell to swell. Their fingers are white from gripping the edges of their plastic chairs.

"Sometimes the ship rocks so much people get thrown around," says Dawn Wright, Quest's instructional technology specialist. The children sway back and forth, mesmerized by a video clip of a ship being thrown around at sea. "Sometimes it rocks so much the wall becomes the floor."

That's just the beginning of what Wright calls a "virtual voyage." Once the waves calm, the thunder quiets and the children stop falling out of their chairs, the technology instructor uses a series of Web sites and video clips to take the students on a tour of the Mayflower's cargo hold, show the ins and outs of a ship's galley and give them a taste of life in the pilgrims' New England.

It's not quite the same, Wright admits, as a real-life trip across the Atlantic, but, she points out, "it's a lot cheaper."

In most Utah school districts already-tight field trip budgets took at least a 10 percent hit this year, but, thanks to the Internet and increasingly technology-saturated classrooms, students like Wright's are "visiting" more museums, national parks and historical locales than ever before. For their part, many popular field-trip destinations nationwide, like the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, are putting together their own — often live ?— Web tours and inviting children to visit online.

"With school budgets being the way they are, it's hard to get kids out on field trips," Wright said. "This gives kids an opportunity to experience learning in a different way without the costs associated with field trips."

The idea of a virtual excursion is hardly new. The Utah Education Network, which provides Web resources for the state's schools, started offering teachers an "oldie moldy" version of a Web field trip 10 years ago as a way to help students at rural schools "see" places like This Is the Place Monument and historic downtown Salt Lake City, said Karen Krier, UEN Web services manager. Those tours, though, which consist of a series of text-accompanied photo links, don't hold a candle to what teachers now are setting up for students.