DEVELOPING INTERACTIVE K-12 EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES THAT EXAMINE THE GEOMORPHOLOGY OF PROVIDENCE CANYON STATE PARK, GA

Spectacular Providence Canyon State Park (PCSP) in southwest Georgia provides an ideal venue for developing standards-based educational resources that examine the geomorphology of land use driven erosion, sedimentation, and landscape development. In many states, including Connecticut and Georgia, these principles are introduced within middle school science standards. This includes distinguishing between weathering and erosion, and investigating how geologic processes change the Earth's surface. Although field trips can provide memorable learning moments, tight budgets, strict curriculum standard requirements, and safety issues make it difficult to take students to spectacular sites like PCSP. Accordingly, this poster reports on efforts to create interactive, digital learning tools that explore geomorphic principles in ways that relate to state education standards. These learning activities are accessed through interactive panoramas of selected locations within the park focusing on eroding headlands, tightly confined valleys, and braided stream deposits down-valley. Links to learning materials make use of digital video, aerial photography, virtual walks, fly-throughs and 360° fisheye imagery built with virtual tour software. Linked lesson plans develop quantitative reasoning skills by using topographic maps, aerial photographs and historical data for Providence Canyon so that middle school students can predict how much sediment was eroded from the canyons. In other activities, students utilize video segments and interactive imagery to investigate differences between weathering, erosion, and deposition. They examine how these processes change landscapes and preserve records of change as illustrated with virtual sediment core samples. Analysis of human activities compare historical images with modern panoramas to illustrate the impact of people on landscapes thereby underscoring the importance of land management and conservation.