This page provides information for participants in our Teacher Friendly Professional Development Program on teaching local and regional Earth system science of the Southwestern United States. 

The workshop is being held in and around Arco, Idaho and Idaho’s Craters of the Moon National Monument, July 11 - 13, 2012. Classroom space is provided by Butte County High School.

One undergraduate credit hour is available from the College of Southern Idaho for a cost of $35.

Here’s a bit about the geologic setting of the workshop:

1. The monument is a 750,000 acres geologic wonderland. Its central feature is the Great Rift, a 62-mile long crack in the earth's crust. The Great Rift is the source of a remarkably preserved volcanic landscape with an array of exceptional features. Craters, cinder coves, lava tubes, deep cracks, and vast lava fields form a strangely beautiful volcanic sea on central Idaho's Snake River Plain.
   

2. Excerpted from:
   

3. Bureau of Land Management Shoshone Field Office Website
   

The workshop begins a professional development program for educators from the Rocky Mountains who want to teach about local and regional Earth system science in an inquiry-based way. We’ll work together to study the region’s geology and to virtually recreate the field sites in a Virtual Field Environment (VFE) so that others can explore it without actually visiting the site. The program includes collaborating on VFE development, deepening geologic knowledge and developing strategies and resources for teaching about local and regional Earth system science.

Participants will provide input into the development of the Teacher-Friendly Guide to the Geoscience of the Rocky Mountains.

Click the map for directions to the school. The map will be updated soon.

Things to Do Before the Workshop:

There are two pieces of homework that are ideally to be done before the workshop. 

1. 1.Create a “Powers of Ten” Google Earth Tour for your school or institution. Google Earth has a new version that simplifies aspects of the work that is not yet fully reflected on all the tutorials linked below, but the new (June 2012) tutorials are included in the Google Earth file downloadable here. Updated tutorials are available here, but For an introduction, see Your Own Powers of Ten Or, go straight to the tutorials: http://virtualfieldwork.org/How_tos/How_tos.html. If you’re comfortable with Google Earth, and have created Google Earth tours previously, this will probably take a few hours.  If you need help, don’t hesitate to contact Don at [email protected] or via Skype at dugganhaas. Using Skype allows screensharing, which makes trouble shooting much easier. The two key purposes of this task are to create a useful teaching resource and to provide some familiarity with a key piece of software we’ll be using in our work together. 
   

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The second task is a reading that should be complete before the workshop.  

2. 2.Read the executive summary of How Students Learn: History, Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom.  We’ll discuss this the first morning of the workshop.  Here are some things to consider as you read:
   

•How does how you learn compare to what the authors claim?

•How should research on learning inform how we teach?

•Note that the reading is not about whether people are visual or auditory learners. It’s more about how you put information together in your head.  How do you figure things out?

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2. This task is intended to both bring this research to your attention and to bring the research to bear on our own teaching.  As the reading describes, we are asking you to be metacognitive. The chapter and it can be downloaded from the National Academy Press website: http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10126   Scroll down to the link for the free executive summary.
   

You may also wish to explore the project websites before the workshop:

    http://virtualfieldwork.org

    http://teacherfriendlyguide.org