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Educational Modules
MGDS education components focus primarily on the creation of educational materials, on-line educational resources, and participation in workshops for educators. The educational materials cover a range of content and approaches involving the use of geoscience research data in education.
Activities for Students
- MARGINS mini-lessons are teacher-ready, undergraduate-level modules developed through the MARGINS program and designed to expose undergraduate students to a range of MARGINS data and data resources. The MARGINS mini-lessons project is funded through an NSF CCLI award.
- Geoscience "Data Puzzles" are data-using activities that purposefully present a low barrier-to-entry for teachers and a high ratio of insight-to-effort for students. They allow a teaching style in which students use geoscience research data to solve problems and answer questions. Tips help teachers anticipate student misconceptions and overcome common challenges in teaching this material.
- The Earth Exploration Toolbook (EET) is a collection of computer-based geoscience activities. Each EET activity (chapter) introduces data sets and analysis tools that enables users to explore some aspect of the Earth system. View the GeoMapApp EET chapter on seafloor topography. View the Virtual Ocean EET chapter on using IODP sediment cores and CHRONOS data to examine the climate history.
- Conceptests are single-topic multiple choice questions given in the middle of a lecture to assess students' learning of basic concepts. Students answer the question first individually and then after discussion with their neighbours. Benefits include better engagement of students, students more focused on concepts, better pacing by teachers, improved class attendance, and superior learning overall.
MGDS Resources
- On-line tutorials are available to help teach researchers, teachers and students use our data access tools.
- On-line recorded webinar highlighting the use of GeoMapApp in the classroom.
- The MGDS MediaBank contains highlight images, videos, maps and illustrations suitable for use by educators at all levels. Image galleries can be browsed freely, and full-resolution images can be requested. Images are also viewable in Map View.
Research on Learning
Studies on student use of data visualizations shows that students often fail to perceive the essential information that experts or teachers had in mind when creating or presenting the visualizations. Sandra Swenson conducted research to establish how students in grades 8-12 interpret a common visualization of a global digital elevation model. The full results of that study can be read here.
Reports & Workshops
MGDS actively participates in education and outreach workshops organised for educators, and reports on those activities are made to our Advisory Commimttee.
- The first MARGINS Education Mini-Workshop, held in April 2007, was designed to create undergraduate-level "mini-lessons" that would engage undergraduate students in scientific research, by using real examples and materials in that reflect the diversity of tools and data resources used to solve geologic problems. This workshop highlighted the integration of diverse earth science datasets from different sources through the use of GeoMapApp and MGDS search tools.
- A second MARGINS mini-lesson workshop in which many new learning activities were created was held in May, 2009.
- The Earth2Class Teachers' Workshops held in October 2006 and February 2009 focussed on GeoMapApp and Virtual Ocean and their use in the K-12 classroom.
- Reports on education components to the MGDS Advisory Committee are available for 2005 and 2006.
Please send questions or comments concerning Education Modules or MGDS tools to info@marine-geo.org.