This past October, I attended the GSA Annual meeting.
This conference is one of the largest in North America on geological topics. Included as part of the conference are a large number of sessions on teaching in Earth’s Sciences. Jerusha Lederman and I both had presentation in the ‘Learning about Earth Online’. My particular presentation was EBooks as a Mandatory Text in Large First Year General Education GeoscienceCourse. This addressed the results we had obtained from surveys from Fall 2016 and Summer 2017 courses.
This session addressed many issues in online learning. A session I found of particular interest was how online learning was used to reach remote locations. This was related to teacher education in Alaska, but would have many potential applications for remoter learning in areas like Northern Ontario, or even for rural areas where it may not be other economically feasible for a student to go away for secondary education.
Another interesting session dealt with creating databases of geological imagery in 3D for use in the classroom. This is a project among geoscience educators to provide free available banks of images for use in the classroom. It also addressed how instructors might create their own images for use.
The GSA allows presenter to upload their presentations, so you can see material covered in all sessions:
If you click on the annual meetings button, you can choose the year, and see what presentations have been uploaded by the presenters.
Mary Helen Armour, Associate Lecturer, Faculty of Science
