A post from Larry Ferlazzo on The Best Sites to Learn about the Earthquake in Italy got me thinking about resources to provide students with background on earthquakes in general – and a handout CSUSM Professor Kathy Hayden recently gave me (during the Robert Marzano session at CUE):
- IRIS Seismic Monitor – Students will love the zoom capabilities of this site as they develop an understanding of the patterns formed by recent earthquakes. Site includes news link to additional info on quakes.
- Flash-based Epicenter Locating Tools – Thanks to Cal State Uni, San Marcos, middle school teachers have a ready-made set of lessons to help students understand how scientists actually gather data on earthquakes.
- U.S. Geologic Survey: Volcanoes Hazards Program – You can’t study about earthquakes without studying about volcanoes. Checkout current volcanic activity from around the world. Site even has real-time images of recent U.S. volcanoes via webcams.
- Physical Geography Animations – Houghton Mifflin modules + University of Kentucky Geology Dept = outstanding resource! Checkout plate tectonics interactive map!
To the above resources, I’d like to add a tip and link for promoting active listening to science videos (or any video that has students sitting for more than five minutes): Today’s Meeting – a tool that can be used for incorporating interactive backchanneling into movie watching. (What is backchanneling, you ask?) I discovered Today’s Meeting via a Tweet from Jackie Gerstein, which led to a post by Chris Webb explaining innovative use of the tool by middle school history teacher Pat Gerding.
Once again, I stand back in awe of the power of Web 2.0 and its ability to build PLNs not possible only a few years back.
April 7, 2009 at 2:10 am
Gail,
Thanks for the plug, and for sharing some excellent resources.
Larry
April 8, 2009 at 10:26 pm
Firstly, thank you for your wonderful comment on my blog re the whopping and shouting from California. It had me in tears. You and dogtrax are always high in my memory stakes and were amongst the first in my Personal Learning Network. That PLN has just grown and its power in education can never be underestimated. I came home early from shopping one night, and had some time to check out twitter. To my surprise and consternation, my friends in Melbourne were experiencing an earthquake. Within 10 mins, we new from the range of tweets how geographically broad the earthquake had hit, we new the size of it and could find the epicentre on google maps all through tweets.
FOrtunately twitter is currently unblocked at school and I am going to make more use of it in class time next term.
Another interesting application for my classes was, that some of the students in Alaska could not complete their video in time for global judging in the netgened project, as the could not get to school due to a volcanic eruption. These are all such teachable moments and the resources that our PLNs can provide are so valuable.
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