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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)