Discover Plate Tectonics
Angela Daneshmand, Santiago Canyon College
This is a student-centered activity for a synchronous online course where students access google slides to complete during a video conferencing session (eg. Zoom) in break out rooms. Students will be introduced to ...

Learning Assessment #1 - Plate Tectonics
Michelle Speta, University of Calgary; Leslie Reid, University of Calgary
An in-class activity that tests students' understanding of the basic concepts of plate tectonics.

Introduction to Google Earth and Plate Tectonics
Denise Bristol, Hillsborough Community College
This activity introduces students to using Google Earth and adding layers to google earth, while re-enforcing plate tectonic concepts and evidence for plate tectonics. Outcomes: 1. Download Google Earth onto ...

Fault Models for Teaching About Plate Tectonics
Modified from an activity by Larry Braile (Purdue University) by TOTLE (Teachers on the Leading Edge) Project and further improved by ShakeAlert.
This short interactive activity has learners to manipulate fault blocks to better understand different types of earthquake-generating faults in different tectonic settings--extensional, convergent, and strike-slip. Fault models aid in visualizing and understanding faulting and plate motions because the instructor and their students can manipulate a three-dimensional model for a true hands-on experience.

Plate Tectonics: GPS Data, Boundary Zones, and Earthquake Hazards
Christopher Berg, Orange Coast College; Beth Pratt-Sitaula, EarthScope Consortium; Julie Elliott, Michigan State University
Students work with high precision GPS data to explore how motion near a plate boundary is distributed over a larger region than the boundary line on the map. This allows them to investigate how earthquake hazard ...

Extra Terrestrial Plate Tectonics
Marshall Bartlett
Students decide whether plate tectonics is operating on another planet in our solar system. Requires students to integrate and process a large array of visual data regarding plate tectonic processes. Students feel ...

Alaska GPS Analysis of Plate Tectonics and Earthquakes
Beth Pratt-Sitaula, EarthScope Consortium
This activity introduces students to high precision GPS as it is used in geoscience research. Students build "gumdrop" GPS units and study data from three Alaska GPS stations from the Plate Boundary Observatory network. They learn how Alaska's south central region is "locked and loading" as the Pacific Plate pushes into North America and builds up energy that will be released in the future in other earthquakes such as the 1964 Alaska earthquake.

Plate Tectonics Basics 1
Bob Stern, The University of Texas at Dallas
Students sketch cross section beneath mid-ocean ridge and subduction zone before and after viewing animation.

Detecting Cascadia's changing shape with GPS | Lessons on Plate Tectonics
Shelley E Olds, EarthScope Consortium
Research-grade Global Positioning Systems (GPS) allow students to deduce that Earth's crust is changing shape in measurable ways. From data gathered by EarthScope's Plate Boundary Observatory, students discover that the Pacific Northwest of the United States and coastal British Columbia — the Cascadia region - are geologically active: tectonic plates move and collide; they shift and buckle; continental crust deforms; regions warp; rocks crumple, bend, and will break.

Plate Tectonics Jigsaw
Anne Egger, Central Washington University
Students participate in a jigsaw activity to learn about types of plate boundaries, becoming an expert in one of five global datasets - earthquakes, volcanoes, seafloor age, topography, and gravity - and then ...