A WEB PAGE TEMPLATE TO SIMPLIFY PRESENTING GIGAPIXEL AND OTHER VIRTUAL AND 3D IMAGERY FOR STUDENT ACTIVITIES

Pre-service teachers encounter many hurdles in fulfilling their science methods courses. They experience anxiety and struggle with questions of self-confidence and self-efficacy. Further, once they successfully complete those courses and enter the education field, they can encounter some of those same hurdles attempting to implement inquiry-based learning utilizing digital technology that they may have only been teasingly exposed to during methods courses or may be totally unfamiliar with. Pre-service teachers may be more inclined to adopt a digital technology for classroom use if they can see that it can be successfully applied with a maximum of confidence and a minimum of anxiety.

One technology useful across the geosciences is the use of gigapixel imagery to construct virtual fieldtrips and virtual geologic sample explorations. However, constructing useful lessons from this technology can be daunting, especially for pre-service and new in-service educators. Some of the technology previously available for creating the web pages needed has been deprecated and is no longer supported by many modern web browsers, for example: Microsoft’s Silverlight technology is no longer supported on most web browsers and is no longer developed or advanced by Microsoft.

This presenter will provide a demonstration of a web page template technology to allow educators to create the web presentations of virtual field locations and virtual geologic samples, including 3D. Utilizing an open-source JavaScript library that does not require any browser plugins, basic web page templates can be created that only require the educator to enter the URL of the resource to use in the student’s web view, in addition to any inquiry instructions to the student or potential questions for the student to consider and answer. This presentation will demonstrate the use of the basic web page template to access gigapixel images on various servers (including those images uploaded to the Gigapan.org website), as well as 3D models on Sketchfab that can be presented to the student alongside the zoomable gigapixel images. In addition, the presentation will demonstrate the use of this web page template across multiple browser platforms and hardware, further reducing educator’s anxiety and other hurdles.

This work gratefully supported by NSF DUE 1323468 "GEODE"