GEOHAZARDS VISUALIZATIONS AND TEACHING MATERIALS JUST-IN-TIME

Major geologic events and natural disasters provide geoscience educators with powerful teachable moments to engage their students with class content. But in order to take advantage of these opportunities, educators need quality topical resources related to current earth science events. The web has become an excellent vehicle for disseminating this type of resource.

In response to the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake and the record-breaking 2005 Hurricane Season, the On the Cutting Edge professional development program developed collections of visualizations for use in teaching. (http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/visualization/collections/tsunami.html, http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/visualization/collections/hurricanes.html). These sites are collections of links to visualizations and other materials that can support the efforts of faculty, teachers, and those engaged in public outreach. They bring together resources created by researchers, government agencies and respected media sources and organize them for easy use by educators. Links are selected to provide a variety of different types of visualizations (e.g. photographic images, animations, satellite imagery) and to assist educators in teaching about the geologic event reported in the news, associated Earth science concepts, and related topics of high interest. The cited links are selected from quality sources and are reviewed by SERC staff before being included on the page. Geoscience educators are encouraged to recommend links and supporting materials and to comment on the available resources. In this way the collection becomes more complete and its quality is enhanced.

These two sites have received substantial use indicating that in addition to use by educators, they are being used by the general public seeking information about the events. Using the same model, we have since developed additional collections related to other geohazards including wildfires, tornados, meteorite impacts, and landslides. All these collections provide an effective mechanism for guiding the public to quality resources created by geoscience researchers and institutions, in addition to supporting incorporation of geoscience research in education.