Google Earth is a great, easy to use program. It has evolved many exciting features since I started using it. It is now more user friendly and requires little instruction. For this assignment, I revisited an older assignment. About 6 or 7 years ago, I added a Google Earth component to a volcanoes assignment. At that time, Google Earth was used a novelty enhancement. Students were asked to locate their volcanoes using Google Earth and use a picture from the program in either their presentation or poster. Google Earth really didn't offer much to that project in terms of learning. Used only as a source of graphics that could have been located more easily through other means, its inclusion was designed to create awareness of the program.
With the motivation of this EDIM508 assignment, I returned to the topic of Volcanoes. Now, instead of being an irrelevant attachment, Google Earth is integrated into the learning process. Students explore the volcanoes in Google Earth to learn about their features, to characterize types of volcanoes, and to relate volcanoes to Earth processes. This project was designed to allow students to work independently, a key benefit for its inclusion in alternative education.
Another benefit to conducting this activity online is the easy transition between resources. Beyond just looking at volcanoes, this format allowed students to explore some of the historical and cultural aspects of living around a volcano. Volcanoes played a prominent role in earlier civilizations, defining their gods and customs. Google Earth allows me to integrate this cultural information into the description boxes or create embedded activities for students to further explore the culture and history around specific volcanoes or volcanoes in general.
I was nervous about using Google Earth at first because of my limited experience in creating custom content for it. Compared to my first attempt at Google Earth in the classroom, I was now met with overwhelming material. Smithsonian's Global Volcanism Program has cataloged and created Google Earth placemarks for an abundance of volcanoes. I used their information as a starting point, and edited several of the placemarks for selected volcanoes to include references to Discovery Education and offer Google Earth instructional activities, as well as cultural and historical information about each volcano.
Initially, I had wanted to do a comparison of population surroundings volcanoes. After searching for a while, I found a working dataset. Unfortunately, I have not found a way to automate enabling/disabling this layer. With the population layer activity, many of the surface features are obscured. I was able to set it to display only above a certain altitude. Doing so forced it to be hidden when students are viewing the surface features of the volcanoes. Aside from developing a better method to show/hide the population data, the assignment needs more work to better analyze the hazards based on populations near the volcanoes.
In its current state, this assignment is not quite stand alone enough for my purposes. I will continue to enhance it. I think it could benefit from additional placemarks and volcano visits to visualize patterns of location, eruption, and design. However, there is a trademark between including enough volcanoes and requiring so many stops to make the experience tedious for the students. The possibilities are there. I foresee a similar activity becoming a part of the alternative and online versions of my Earth and Sapce Science courses.
Course and Student Information:This is designed for use with 9th-12th grade students in alternative education and cyber school settings. This will accompany instruction on volcanoes, earthquakes, and plate tectonics. It will address the following Pennsylvania academic standards:3.1.12B: Apply concepts of models as a method to predict and understand science and technology.3.5.12A: Analyze and evaluate earth features and processes that change the earth.
Additional References:
- Data Sets:
- Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program - Holocene Volcanoes(available from: http://www.volcano.si.edu/world/globallists.cfm?listpage=googleearth)
- NASA Earth Observing System - Population Density(available from: http://neo.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/Search.html?group=64 and http://serc.carleton.edu/eet/aura/part_2.htmlUSGS Earthquakes and Plate Tectonics Data(available from: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/kml.php)
- Volcanoes in Historical and Popular Culture. USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory (CVO). Retrieved December 10, 2011, from http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/LivingWith/PopCulture/mythology.html
- Mount St. Helens. (2011, December 7). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 21:51, December 10, 2011, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mount_St._Helens&oldid=464488786
- Ragnarök. (2011, December 10). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 21:52, December 10, 2011, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ragnar%C3%B6k&oldid=465135697
- 2010 eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull. (2011, December 10). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 21:52, December 10, 2011, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2010_eruptions_of_Eyjafjallaj%C3%B6kull&oldid=465114655
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