The COVID pandemic has changed how all of us are teaching and assessing our students. As in many institutions, most all classes at Waubonsee Community College were online, and in the case of the Physical Geology lecture and lab classes, asynchronous online. This new modality necessitated changes to many assignments and laboratory exercises and experiments. A critical part of the challenge is to make sure that solutions to assessments cannot easily be found with a Google search. This lead to the development of new assessments for the Fall 2020 semester. For the lecture class, a new homework assignment was developed in which students picked a well-defined topic in geology and were asked to write a 1 page paper on it, often called '1 pagers'. The motivation was to engage the students in something they are interested in, while still being on task. Motivation for this assignment was the background discussion section common to many grant proposals. For the lab class, the facebook page 'Higher Education and the Coronavirus" was consulted for ideas, in particular a post by Sheldon Turner of Triton College. He suggested assigning an 'infographic', which is essentially a well-designed and informative poster. Students were asked to design an infographic as their final exam, which was to cover some part of one of the labs that was in the second half of the semester. Reviewing the results of the 1 pagers and infographics, it is clear that these assignments tap into the students own interests, providing them with ownership and motivation leading to their success. Details of the assignments and examples will be provided.

The Climate Toolkit is a resource manual designed to help the reader navigate the complex and perplexing issue of climate change by providing tools and strategies to explore the underlying science. As such it contains a collection of activities that make use of readily available on-line resources developed by research groups and public agencies. These include web-based climate models, climate data archives, interactive atlases, policy papers, and "solution" catalogs. Unlike a standard textbook, it is designed to help readers do their own climate research and devise their own perspective rather than providing them with a script to assimilate and repeat.With the sudden movement to remote teaching the manual is being revised to function better in this new instructional environment. To that end this presentation is as much invitation as it is "show and tell". The invitation is to participate in this ongoing update by becoming a reviewer. The aim is to complete this update by winter term 2022.

This activity will focus on Student-Produced Audio Narratives (SPANs). These are classroom activity assignments where students engage with content by telling a story using simple audio recording and production techniques. The SPAN assignments were aligned with the learning goals of 1) identifying and describing a current issue or problem (and underlying scientific concepts) in the geosciences, 2) identifying an audience that is related to/impacted by this issue, and compose an audio piece to effectively communicate the science to this audience, and 3) examining solutions or approaches to address concerns and illustrate how this may impact the desired audience. The assignments submitted included audio collages, workforce explorations, public service announcements, place-based explorations, and other creative narratives. To achieve their learning goals, the students undertaking the SPAN assignment generally followed the steps of recording, producing logs of the recordings, outlining their project, preparing a script, combining sound elements using software, and then playing the audio narrative for their peers. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant #1708590. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.

In this jigsaw activity, students are placed in groups. Each group reads a different written record of an oral history about tsunamis. These indigenous stories are from around the world. To guide their interpretations, students answer activity questions. They look for tsunami characteristics and safety information. Then the groups are mixed. Students share what they learned from each story. Groups compare stories. They discuss: Are there any similarities in the warning signs, descriptions of the tsunami waves, or damage and did the traditional stories contain any safety information? I extend the lesson by sharing the importance of preserving and utilizing traditional knowledge. In Simeulue Island, oral traditions informed generations that feeling an earthquake and observing receding water were signs that a tsunami would quickly arrive and to immediately move to higher ground. Although close to the epicenter of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, only seven out of approximately 75,000 people on the island died. Lessons from the stories that students read are integrated into lessons on modern scientific understanding of tsunamis (causes and characteristics) and tsunami safety (natural warning signs). Students learn that disaster management personnel are using traditional knowledge to improve local hazard preparations.

This activity uses students' cultural heritage and personal experience as a form of place-based geology. As an introduction to minerals, students are asked to provide a photo and write about a culturally or personally significant mineral. This assignment invites students to connect to their cultural heritage while also connecting them personally to the material covered in class. This is also a way for professors to get to know their students better, especially as some students choose a mineral that has sentimental value or that is a family heirloom. This assignment can easily be changed and used with other geology content such as rocks, volcanoes, and streams. Incorporating students' cultural heritage and personal experiences in an assignment is a simple, yet highly effective way to acknowledge and welcome diversity in a geology class.

As a part of the Geology 101 online lab, I have students share a video blog of themselves describing what they did or what they learned by doing the labs. They choose the mode of presentation and submit a URL to the blog space in Blackboard and it counts as 50% of their lab grade. I have found that I can better understand what they did or didn't learn from the lab by watching the video. It is also validation that they did the lab themselves. I can not only grade this blog, but I can engage in dialog with the student about the material.

This Share-a-thon presentation will present and sharing of an open educational resource Excel tutorial (CC 4.0 BY NC SA). This Excel tutorial was created to introduce Earth, Environmental and Geographic science students to basic spreadsheet functions. It is written for 100 level students. The Excel tutorial will be available for every user to download prior to the Rendezvous. Participants will gain an overview of the material covered in the tutorial and how it can be incorporated into departmental or program level curriculum for developing quantitative skills.

In this activity, students infer climate variability over the past few decades by investigating climatic signals preserved in an ice core retrieved from Western Greenland. Students are initially challenged to identify patterns and trends present in the ice core records. Additional background information is provided to familiarize students with the proxy data and the climate information deduced from the proxies. As students observe various patterns or trends, they experience the difficulty in ascribing ice core signals to particular climatic events without a well-defined timescale placing the observed variability in the longer context of Earth's climate history. Students devise strategies to develop a timescale for the ice core records by applying the history of above-ground nuclear weapons testing to the measured beta-radioactivity profile in the core. Given this reference horizon, students estimate the year the ice core was drilled by assessing seasonally varying oxygen isotope ratios and dust concentrations. Upon determination of an appropriate timescale, students reevaluate their initial patterns and trends through time to identify specific anomalous years. The impacts of environmental and geopolitical legislation are also observed, not only in the reduced beta-radioactivity after the Test Ban Treaty, but also in reduced sulfate concentrations after the Clean Air Act.

Learning modules and supplemental materials focused on geodesy and geodetic applications are freely available to educators through UNAVCO Education and Community Engagement. In this Share-a-thon, we will share a suite of resources for your courses (higher education and secondary level) from UNAVCO efforts and the GEodesy Tools for Societal Issues (GETSI) project. Resources include geodetic-focused modules, posters, hands-on demonstrations, animations and videos. GETSI teaching materials feature geodetic data and quantitative skills applied to societally important issues (climate change, natural hazards, water resources, environmental management). The UNAVCO posters and infographics - available as PDF - can be used as teaching tools, displayed in labs, and shared as online learning supplements. Hands-On demonstrations provide novice learners experience with observing and measuring many physical properties and changes at the Earth's surface using geodetic techniques. YouTube videos and animations promote Earth science learning, share UNAVCO services, and inspire the next generation of our workforce.(Links:UNAVCO Education: https://www.unavco.org/education UNAVCO YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/unavcovideosGETSI: https://serc.carleton.edu/getsi/index.html)

The purpose of this project was to promote and facilitate functional group work by providing feedback for students and professors using peer-assessment surveys administered after group assignments and quizzes. We created a streamlined peer-assessment survey in Qualtrics to collect feedback on an individual's contributions and their overall group dynamic. We created a Walkthough document to share customizable, ready-made peer-assessment templates for short-term group assignments/quizzes and long-term group projects, as well as provide a means of easily extracting data with minimal knowledge of Qualtrics. Also in the Walkthrough are functional tips and considerations when implementing peer-assessment surveys.

To overcome major challenges of teaching mineralogy and petrology classes that are based on hands-on instruction with a polarizing microscope, a collaborative effort resulted in a web-based resource of digitized thin sections and hand samples, called the "Virtual Petrography Laboratory". This tool enables instructors to select samples from a growing database and deliver them to their students as a digital laboratory set. Items include full thin section slides in plane and cross-polarized light, special 'rotatable' points under different magnifications and light settings, 3-dimensional hand sample models, and traditional photographs. Each customized selection can be easily embedded in learning systems, or distributed to students as a simple URL. Additional sample data is available to instructors upon request. Though we used this system as a pandemic-era substitute for in-person training, we note that it will also be useful as a supplementary resource with unlimited capacity for existing microscopy-based courses and as a highly accessible tool for those with difficulties using or accessing traditional microscopes. In this activity, we will train instructors with the basic functionality of selecting and delivering sample sets to their students. We will also provide examples of how we integrate the interactive content into a coherent laboratory exercise.

Since the Pleistocene, over half of all large animals have become extinct — mostly through human population pressures and global warming that has transcended prehistoric, recent, and modern times. Highlighting these continuous but accelerating trends could promote awareness of the impending sixth mass extinction and its historic precedents. This in turn could promote engagement with paleontology and conservation to reverse species losses. My activity is a showcase of the pilot version of Where the Wild Things Were: an online interactive and accessible atlas of charismatic animal losses from the Pleistocene to today, hosted by the University of California Museum of Paleontology's website. This will be a live web demonstration highlighting geographic range contraction and (pre)historic multimedia points of interest for jaguars (Panthera onca) in the US. The outcomes of this activity are to highlight a novel resource for Earth educators looking to draw connections between paleontology and modern trends, especially as relevant for conservation. I also seek feedback to improve Where the Wild Things Were as a more effective Earth education resource.

These videos are not directly an activity, but rather serve as a publicly-available foundation for upper level undergraduate lab instruction in optical mineralogy and igneous and metamorphic petrology. A set of ~50 reference tutorials covers most major minerals (quartz, plagioclase, garnet, etc.) plus some key topics in optical mineralogy (pleochroism, cleavage, etc.). These tutorials have voice-over explanations and options for comments. Another ~200 videos show "unknowns" – rocks that have readily identifiable minerals, but without explanation or option for comments. A google doc answer key is available to instructors for the unknowns, along with a list of topics that I use the rocks to teach about (pleochroism, relief, textures etc.). The videos serve as a reference point summarizing key mineral characteristics, and as an on-line option for viewing minerals in thin section.

Similar to many post-secondary institutions, the second-year Igneous and Metamorphic petrology labs at the University of Calgary were forced to go online due to the covid-19 pandemic. Online resources for hand sample and thin section description were scoured in order to find high-quality websites that allowed students to manipulate (turn, zoom in and out, change plane-polarized to cross-polarized light) the rock image. Two of our favorites emerged: Sketchfab for hand sample descriptions, and Virtualmicroscope.org for thin section descriptions. Online lab activities were largely built around these two websites. Some rock samples in Sketchfab have been annotated by users to show different minerals, which is a great teaching tool. The thin sections on Virtualmicroscope.org have excellent descriptions of mineralogy and texture, and many include rotatable imagery to show students optical properties as the stage is rotated. Lab activities for students included mineral and texture identification, rock naming, mineral proportion estimation, and petrogenesis interpretation based on samples from these websites.

I teach high school science at the School of Innovation, part of Springfield City School District. We are a Project-Based Learning (PBL) school. For our climate unit, students first learned about climate and feedback loops affecting climate. Students then chose a geological feature in our region (the Great Miami Buried Valley Aquifer, the reservoir, Lake Erie, various ice-age animals whose bones/fossils have been found here) and related this feature to Ohio's paleoclimate during the Pleistocene Epoch. For their PBL projects, the students recreated Pleistocene biomes of their chosen animal, interviewed local historians and geologists and recreated rock layers. They are also preparing to write about it in the local newspaper.

By examining ways in which humans have interacted with fossils, we can highlight a range of cultural connections to paleontology that emphasize improved representation of inclusive cultural narratives while championing learning about the fossil record in a way that isn't solely from a Eurocentric lens. Fossil use cards are an educational resource developed by several members of the Education and Outreach committee of the Paleontological Society for the "Earth Materials in Our Lives" focus of Earth Science Week 2020, representing rigorous educational development work. This resource includes 25 cards that each feature an image and name of a fossil, and how the fossil resource has been used by humans (e.g., jewelry, forensics, building materials). Students and educators can mix and match cards for small group classroom work or interact with a virtual drag-and-drop version online. The resource contains a list of relevant standards by grade level and NGSS-aligned extension questions for further discussion. Fun facts, a Kahoot quiz, and pseudofossil cards are additionally included for ready-to-use learning opportunities. Learning outcomes include understanding and identification of fossils, how fossils are and have been used by a wide variety of global cultures, and when and where ancient biota lived in Earth history.

Goal: To teach students a way to approach word problems and reduce the panic that sometimes ensues.Plan: Introduce the problem solving approach, model it in one or two example problems, have them practice it in one or two example problems, and then require using this approach for all word problems in the rest of the semester. Provide a handout laying out the approach for reference.The Approach: (modified from engineering classes) Basically, this follows a given-find-solution format that forces students to identify the information they are given as well as what they are being asked to calculate before attempting to solve the problem. Many students struggle with these beginning steps, causing them to panic and either give up entirely or try mad things like just multiplying two numbers together and hoping for the best. The gut check at the end deserves special attention – many times students could use their intuition to judge whether their result is even reasonable and thus catch some errors they may have made, but they often don't bother to take the time to do so. Outcomes: Reduced math anxiety and increased confidence when facing quantitative problems.

The Integrating Chemistry and Earth science (ICE) project developed a new high school chemistry curriculum that infuses Earth science content into a traditional high school chemistry course. In the Thermochemistry Unit, students explore Heat Energy pathways in Urban Baltimore. Teachers use an embedded assessment 2-3 times during instruction to evaluate student understanding and assess learning about how heat energy is transferred, stored and released in urban areas. Teachers pair these assessments with lessons on the heat capacity of urban materials (brick, concrete, marble) and a schoolyard heat exploration using infrared thermometers to help students understand that heat energy behaves differently in urban vs. rural settings. Student outcomes include a more nuanced understanding of how the urban structure influences the behavior of heat energy and how human-built structures contribute to the Urban Heat Island Effect.