HARNESSING THE POWER OF ARC-GIS, STORYMAP, AND GIGAPAN TECHNOLOGY FOR CREATING VIRTUAL FIELD TRIPS FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING PHYSICAL GEOLOGY

Recent advances in multimedia authoring technologies have enabled educators to seamlessly integrate a variety of media elements for crafting virtual field trips which seek to explain geologic concepts at the college level. During the past three years, the Arc-GIS family of software has continued to develop a proprietary tool titled “StoryMap” for providing educators with a simple, user-friendly platform to tie together different media types for teaching in both face-to-face and online environments. This presentation showcases the manner in which we utilized StoryMap in creating a variety of media content including images, video, animations, and ultra-high resolution panoramas (GigaPans) for an assortment of virtual field trips.

Each Virtual Field Trip begins with an ultra-high resolution GigaPan at a key geographic location that allows a student to explore a landscape in both an open-exploration and a guided manner. Smaller areas within the larger GigaPan vista can be highlighted using thumbnails called “SnapShots.” A student then clicks on the SnapShot, and is automatically zoomed-in for a close-up examination of a feature that may be an image, animation, or video. Each SnapShot element is linked to an explanation of the image, animation, or video, including questions (as text), that are accessible in a separate window in the MindTap shell (a proprietary software owned by Cengage). Questions are in a multiple-choice or true/false format with instant feedback provided to the student after they have clicked on an answer. This allows them to understand why the answer they picked is either correct or incorrect. In addition to GigaPans, each Virtual Field Trip consists of a series of Field Stops representing locations where an instructor may cover a topic in greater detail just as they would in an actual field trip.

To date we have created nine Virtual Field Trips covering various topics such as Grand Canyon National Park (Geologic Time), Hawaiian Volcanoes National Park (Volcanoes), Yosemite National Park (Igneous Rocks), Capitol Reef National Park (Sedimentary Rocks), and Petrified Forest National Park (Fossils). Ongoing work is focused on producing four additional Virtual Field Trips about coastal features, including coral reefs, for supplementing instruction in oceanography courses.