UNAVCO Educational Materials: High School Educators

Are you a high-school educator who uses UNAVCO educational materials in your classroom?  Comment on this post about your experiences using our materials at the high-school level.  How have you modified the lessons for high-schoolers?  What other materials would you like us to work on for the high-school level?

UNAVCO Educational Materials: Undergraduate Educators

Are you an undergraduate educator who uses UNAVCO educational materials in your classroom?  Comment on this post about your experiences using our materials at the college level.  How have you modified the lessons for a large lecture class versus a smaller upper-level class?  What other materials would you like us to work on for the college level?

The Great Southern California ShakeOut Teachable Moment

The Great Southern California ShakeOut is an earthquake drill for a simulated magnitude 7.8 earthquake on the San Andreas fault on November 13, 2008.  UNAVCO has created a Teachable Moment, which is a set of powerpoint slides on ShakeOut for you to use in your classroom.  The slideshow can be downloaded at: www.unavco.org/EO. 

Note: the slideshow includes a video of the shaking.  There a two options for downloading the slideshow and the video.  1) You can download the powerpoint and the video separately, and then exit the slideshow to play the video on the second slide OR 2) you can download the powerpoint and video as a zip file, which you then have to unzip.  If you keep the video and powerpoint in the same folder, the movie should play within the powerpoint.

UNAVCO's Educational Materials

This blog is open to everyone using UNAVCO's educational materials, including our maptools like EarthScope Voyager Jr., our lesson plans, and the real-time GPS data in the classroom. Use this post to ask questions or post comments related to any of our educational materials.

New Podcast: Professor Anne Sheehan on the Rio Grande Rift, earthquake hazards, and more

Professor Anne Sheehan of the University of Colorado in Boulder talks about studying the Rio Grande Rift, the earthquake hazard in New Mexico and Colorado, how she got into geophysics, what it takes to be a geologist, and more.

This is an enhanced podcast that includes audio and pictures (.m4a), which can play in iTunes or Quicktime.

Download the podcast by clicking here.

Please contact Celia Schiffman at celias@unavco.org if you have an idea or topic for a future podcast.

Houston Workshop attendees

Did you just attend the GSA workshop in Houston? Ask the instructors questions about GPS, InSAR and LiDAR here!

Questions for UNAVCO E&O staff

Comment on this post with questions directed at UNAVCO staff. Confused about an activity? Not sure how to find something we covered in your workshop? Here is the place to ask!

Recent workshop attendees feedback

Did you recently attend a UNAVCO workshop? Now that you've had some time to reflect, and possibly apply some of the material we covered, what was the best part of the workshop? What would you like to see changed? What other types of follow-up would you like UNAVCO to provide? Reply by commenting on this post!

Questions for other teachers: What did and didn't work when you used a UNAVCO activity in your classroom?

Comment on this post and share a teaching experience using UNAVCO materials in the classroom. What activity did you use? Did you change anything? What teaching tips would you offer to other teachers? What else would you like to see UNAVCO create to compliment the activity?

Welcome!

Welcome to UNAVCO's Education and Outreach blogs! These blogs are intended to be a resource for teachers who have attended our workshops, and would like to communicate with other teachers and UNAVCO E&O staff about the use of UNAVCO materials in the classroom, as well as for those who haven't attended a workshop but are using our materials and would like a forum for discussion. We will also post updates when we have new materials, and information about upcoming workshops and other activites at UNAVCO.

UNAVCO, a non-profit, membership-governed consortium, supports and promotes Earth science by advancing high-precision techniques for the measurement and understanding of deformation. UNAVCO also supports education to meet the needs of the community and the public.

Part of UNAVCO Education and Outreach is holding educational workshops for secondary and undergraduate educators around the country on the application of high-precision GPS data to teaching about plate tectonics. During a workshop, we provide a high-precision GPS primer and concrete examples of quantitative skills, we cover how to download GPS data sets and construct and interpret time series, and we discuss techniques for classroom integration and how to access web-based UNAVCO resources.

We have a wide range of educational materials, including lesson plans, map-making tools, and processed GPS data illustrating various tectonic processes. All of our materials are available online at: http://www.unavco.org/edu_outreach/data.html.

Please email Celia Schiffman at celias@unavco.org with comments or suggestions on the UNAVCO E&O blogs.