KEY SITES OF THE 2014 "BORDER TO BELTWAY" FIELD EXCHANGE IN A VIRTUAL FIELD TRIP FORMAT

The 2014 "Border to Beltway" field exchange was a new program aimed at recruiting students from under-represented populations into the geosciences by means of participation in a two-week field trip: one week in West Texas, and a second week in the mid-Atlantic region. This collaboration between Northern Virginia Community College and El Paso Community College resulted in 25 community college students working in the field, collaborating on projects, and networking in locations as diverse as Shenandoah National Park, the Permian Basin, a Pleistocene volcano, and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC. An offshoot of the main project was the production of virtual field trips for both locations, utilizing Google Earth and GigaPan technology. This presentation will feature some of the landscape, outcrop, and hand-sample GigaPans that were produced as part of the effort, emebedded into a Google Earth framework. Now, any student anywhere (with access to the internet) can access these same foundational rock outcrops that the "B2B" students visited and learn the lessons they impart.