In this assignment, students use Google Earth to investigate a variety of fluvial and glacial features. Firstly, they simply have to find an example of both a meandering and braided river and cut-and-paste the image into their assignment. They also need to trace the path of the river to see where it ends. Next, they are given three latitude/longitude coordinates and are asked to determine the river type, channel width, floodplain width, gradient, etc. In the last part, they are given the latitude/longitude coordinates of two valleys. They use the terrain & tilt features of Google Earth to determine whether the valley is V- or U-shaped. They then decide what sort of processes is responsible for the valley's shape.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

This activity from a Geomorphology course is designed to familiiarize students with using Google Earth, as well as making the connection between features they see in a map or satellite view vs. what they might see from ground level. Students will use this exercise as the first of several where they will evaluate landforms and the materials and processes responsible for their development.

This exercise takes advantage of student's interest in Google Earth to teach some basic concepts about meandering rivers. Students prepare for class by reading about lowland rivers and/or hearing a lecture on them. They bring their own laptops to class or share with a partner or I take the entire class to the computer lab next door. In class they work through the worksheet and use Google Earth to take quantitative measurements of the rivers. They look at historic migration of meander bends and quantify river sinuousity, wavelength, amplitude, and radius of curvature of meander bends. They explore meandering bedrock rivers in Taiwan as a cool thought exercise in how that can happen. They end with looking at images from an area that they will have a field trip to during their next lab period. To keep people from flying through the exercise and getting bored, we do the whole activity in think-pair-share style. Students work on a location, answer the questions, and then we discuss it as a class.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

This activity focuses on one of the many free web mapping applications available: Google My Maps. Google My Maps allows you to create personalized maps, complete with linked photographs and YouTube videos. However, Google My Maps also includes a series of tools for simple quantitative analysis, for example to find the latitude and longitude of a location or the length and area of a geographic feature (e.g. a stream or a glacier).

Spreadsheets Across the Curriculum module. This activity introduces the student to the concept of weighted averages by asking them to calculate course grades and grade point averages.

Students examine a geologic map of the Grand Canyon and two imaginary vertical cores through canyon stratigraphy. They use these data to construct a cross-section across the canyon and to answer questions about the geology of the Grand Canyon.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

Brief analysis of the geologic setting of the Grand Strand (Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and vicinity) coast and the limited occurrence of sand suitable for beach re-nourishment. Students use a USGS Fact Sheet to examine the beach, near offshore, and edge of Coastal Plain geology.

The Tour Stops are arranged in a teaching sequence, starting with continental rifting and incipient ocean basin formation in East Africa and the Red Sea and ending with the oldest surviving fragments of oceanic crust. Transforms and fracture zones are introduced, also abandoned basins, convergent boundaries, and marginal basins. Instructors can easily change the sequence of stops to suit their courses using the Google Earth desktop app or by editing the KML file.

In the age of publicly funded space exploration involving several national space agencies, knowing about the highest mountain in the solar system is as basic to geospatial literacy as knowing about the highest mountain on Earth is to classical geography. This activity is a Google Earth grand tour of the terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, the Moon, and Mars) and guides students to explore atmospheres, magnetospheres, landscapes, and interiors. Each tour commences with an astronaut's overview from space, and then it zooms in on specific, media-rich placemarks, and ends with a concluding view from space. This is intended to help students develop a sense of relative position and relative size of features on other planets.

This is a lab/project in which the students not only name and identify a suite of granitic rocks but try to piece together the tectonic and geologic history of the Idaho batholith. This activity brings together the process of naming rocks, determining the I-, S- and A-type nature of the rocks, estimating magma source and potential assimilants, a nonquantitative depth of intrusion for the suites, and any distinctive textures that might help tell the story of the batholith. It forces students to move outside the rock in a box lab for granites and create a regional geologic history.

I find this project to work well in class for a number of reasons. Group work and counting on your classmates to interpret the rocks is a foundation of the entire project. The students get exposed to more rocks than in a typical lab without having to identify each of the in great detail since they are ultimately only responsible for their own suite. I have removed at least one lecture on granites and replaced it with this project for them to do the interpretation themselves rather than just passively absorb the geology.

The students have just a basic introduction to I-, A- and S-type granites and the models for the generation of these magmas. They have already learned about grain size relating to cooling rate and depth of intrusion, but it usually is awhile since they thought about these concepts.

Obviously this project depends on the exact samples being available, but the theory of the project can be applied to numerous geologic settings.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

To prepare for this project, students develop hands-on research skills throughout the course of the semester. A variety of class activities emphasize how to pose research questions, develop hypotheses, determine materials and methods, and understand how fossil data are used to answer a variety of research questions. Class discussions of primary literature emphasize how to track down, synthesize, and evaluate primary literature. Case studies presented in lecture illustrate how to tackle research questions in paleontology. For this project, students apply all of these skills to tackle a topic they find interesting in paleontology. Intermediate deadlines are established to help students develop a research question, write up a rough draft, and revise it in detail. Student progress is also tracked via updates to their peers in the classroom. The written grant proposals must range in length from between 10-12 pages (NOT including the references cited or figures and tables sections) and are double-spaced, 12 pt font, with 1" margins. The rough drafts of the proposals are worth 5% and the final versions are worth 15% of the students' total grade.

Graphical Just-in-Time-Teaching questions for use before classes in which students explore position, velocity and acceleration graphs.

Students are sent an Excel file containing the depths of various types of datums from DSDP and ODP cores: biostratigraphic, oxygen isotope, and paleomagnetic datums.

They are then asked to plot datums from different cores (and settings) and evaluate the stratigraphic completeness of the cores based on the behavior of the datums.

After plotting the datums, they are asked a number of questions about stratigraphic completeness, reliability of datums, etc.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

This is a graphic correlation lab exercise. It uses real data from a peer-reviewed journal publication by Lucy Edwards (1989). (I have manipulated the data set a little bit.) Students can finish the activity in two hours or less.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

This workshop involves students in evaluating the efficacy of posters as a communication tool, focusing on elements of clarity in poster and graphic design.

In this demonstration students are given a position, velocity or acceleration graph showing the motion of an object. They are asked to write a short description of the motion, and make predictions by completing the remaining two graphs.

Students are given major-element, whole-rock chemical analyses from ten samples of lava from the 1868 eruption of Mauna Loa. They do not know sequence of eruption, only that the lavas came from the same volcano. Students are asked to evaluate the hypothesis that the observed chemical variation is due to the fractional crystallization of olivine. The hypothesis can be tested any of a number of graphs. Several examples are given in the accompanying Excel workbook.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

In this biology lab extension, student will have already collected leaves from the playground and surrounding school areas and sorted them into categories according to leaf properties. Students will use the leave classifications/ sorts to graph the properties of the leaves.

Student graphing of high and low tide from locations showing the three tide types (diurnal, semi-diurnal, and mixed) and the Bay of Fundy (tidal amplitude increased by resonance). Students recognize that not all tides are the same and that location is an important control on tides.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

Because there is not a lot of surface structure to map in glacial terranes of the midwest, especially in big cities, various simulations can help. This is a "big-city" simulation of making a geologic map and interpreting the structure of a small area (a cemetery) by measuring the strike and dip of gravestones. This field activity is followed by lab work, including plotting the attitudes on stereonets and interpreting the patterns.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)