ENHANCING PETROLOGY TEACHING AND LEARNING USING ONLINE RESOURCES

We live, teach, and learn in a rapidly expanding digital world. An immense amount of petrologic information is available only a few clicks away, and amazing computing power is at the fingertips of anyone with a laptop computer. As teachers we are all looking for ways to evolve with the technology to be more effective in helping our students learn petrology. For me, this has meant designing and coding interactive web pages to capitalize on the visual and dynamic capabilities of the digital world. See https://www.science.smith.edu/~jbrady/petrology/index.php On this website, information and concepts are conveyed with pages that allow the reader to zoom, pan, juxtapose, superimpose and change images with mouse movements and sliders. Some pages on the website offer data visualization and interpretation to students by displaying pre-loaded or user-uploaded data on graphs, diagrams, or maps with options to change axes and scale. Other pages provide interactive models such as fractional crystallization, norm calculations, or chemical diffusion with data entry and slider control. And there are pages that provide feedback to users on their input about phase diagrams, thin section images, and activity questions. It is my experience that students learn more by doing than by reading or hearing lectures. It is my hope that interactive web pages are more like doing than like reading. However, I know that students must be motivated to explore or make good use of an online resource. Teachers can provide that motivation with assignments, projects, questions, and especially enthusiasm. We must convince our students that the concepts and tools of petrology can reveal secrets of rocks and of the earth. And that even if they do not use the concepts and tools of petrology for their own careers, they will be better able to understand what information can be gained from rocks, and how petrology interpretations might be tested and confirmed.