BUILDING A PLACE-BASED GEOSCIENTIST-REVIEWED GEOED VIDEO LIBRARY: GOOGLE EARTH GEOED VIDEO LIBRARY (GEGVL)

Recent surveys show that concerns about search time, platform safety and trustworthy content are the 3 most significant challenges for educators searching for videos to use in the classroom. Searches on YouTube and Google are most common way that teachers find such videos. However, such searches are time consuming and many geoscience educational videos (GeoEd videos) on these platforms are on similar, limited, and intro-level topics. Moreover, many GeoEd videos are not scientifically accurate or are otherwise inappropriate. At the same time, reliable and appropriate GeoEd videos are also hard to find.

To make high-quality GeoEd videos more accessible for teachers and students and to save time in their searches, we built a place-based, geoscientist-reviewed GeoEd video library based on the widely-used Google Earth platform. Earth science topics are typically complex in terms of location, timing, and how these are best explained, and are often related to a specific location or region that is intrinsically interesting. The Google Earth GeoEd Video Library (GEGVL) provides an index of high-quality, place-based geoscience videos that are geospatially organized in Google Earth as a first-level visual index. The global map emphasizes where the content of these GeoEd videos focuses, allowing students and teachers to “roam” the Earth to increase their knowledge about key Earth processes and events. Our approach links student knowledge of key processes with places they know or that interest them and uses a platform that requires no learning curve. GEGVL also provides a way for geoscience instructors to quickly find high-quality GeoEd videos to use in the classroom. In order to understand the usefulness of GEGVL for informal Geoscience learning, we surveyed 23 lower division undergraduate students via Google Forms. Responses to the GeoEd Video Library from surveyed students were overall positive, with discussion of version preference and concerns/suggestions. We are beginning to populate GEGVL. The link for the sample GeoEd Video Library (KMZ file) is https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UYy-Rn7V7Yp6AZ4plrZkZypHQ28nZohK/view?usp=sharing

We invite contributions to GEGVL from all geoscientists; please contact the first author for more information.