EMERGING DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES FOR GEOSCIENCE EDUCATION AND OUTREACH

New digital technologies, particularly virtual globes, digital mapping, social networks, blogs, online collaborative environments, and mobile devices, have the potential to engage geoscience students in innovative ways. Virtual globes, for example, can merge data from a variety of disciplines, and can present these data spatially and temporally. Integration of geoscientific information across these multiple dimensions is difficult for students. Virtual globes can provide students with a data-rich experience with the potential to support deepening their understanding of geoscience. More specifically, displaying geology in three spatial dimensions and through time helps students practice visualizing structural and tectonic problems and issues of living with dynamic landscapes. Furthermore, overlaying data from different disciplines can allow students to contextualize complex sustainability issues.

Here we present several frameworks to facilitate the development of educational activities, along with examples of activities that employ new technologies and digital repositories that allow distribution of educational materials. Examples include lesson plans that employ 3-D Collada models imported into Google Earth to demonstrate sub-surface geology and geophysics; software that helps instructors track student actions and evaluate learning outcomes; and Google Earth tools and activities for teaching sustainability, land use change, and local geology. Due to their low cost and easy distribution, technologies and techniques presented here can be adapted for use in a variety of geoscience education contexts, from physical geology problem sets for general education and introductory geoscience students to upper-division lab exercises.This presentation will include informal discussion and demonstrations of various educational tools.