Site Guide: Plate Tectonics

Teaching Activities and Labs

Plate Tectonics Activities Search - This link will provide users with hundreds of teaching activities focused on plate tectonics, including Dale Sawyer's popular jigsaw exercise, Discovering Plate Boundaries. Each activity listing provides a short summary of the activity.

Visualizations

Plate Tectonic Movements Visualization Collection - This large collection of visualizations includes simple animations, GIS-based animated maps, paleogeographic maps and globes, as well as numerous illustrations and photos.

Courses

Plate Tectonics Course Search - This search shows courses that focus, in part or in whole, on plate tectonics.

Using Tectonic Data in Your Classroom

MARGINS Mini-lesson Collection - The MARGINS project focuses on understanding processes governing the evolution of continental margins. MARGINS Mini-Lessons are modular learning materials that repurpose the data resources, visualizations, and other information sources developed through MARGINS and MARGINS-related research for use in examining fundamental earth processes in undergraduate classrooms from a multidisciplinary perspective.

Teaching with Data, Simulations, and Models - This collection of pages provides resources to help faculty use data, simulations, and models effectively and easily, and contains access to teaching materials and tips from the classroom and literature about the supporting pedagogy. It includes ideas for teaching as well as offers a collection of about 30 data sheets (a data sheet concisely describes a particular scientific data set in a way that is useful to educators interested in teaching with the data set) and a section on tools useful for simulations, several of which involve plate tectonics.

The Earth Exploration Toolbook - The Earth Exploration Toolbook has a number of data-rich activities designed for high school classrooms including Analyzing Plate Motion Using EarthScope GPS Data and Evidence for Plate Tectonics. The site browse will give you a complete list of plate tectonic related activities.

General Resources

Geophysics - On the Cutting Edge - This series of pages includes classroom activities and visualization collections along with other useful information and resources involving geophysics and plate tectonics.