The Michigan Technological University Peace Corps Master’s International (PCMI) program in mitigation of natural geological hazards combines Peace Corps service with a master’s degree in geology, geophysics, or geological engineering. The program provides students with a 2 yr international field experience, which helps to educate an adaptable, interculturally competent geoscientist. The challenges of conducting research while serving in the Peace Corps often provide opportunities for substantial learning and growth. A multiple-year evaluation of the PCMI program (2005–2013) suggests substantial impacts on students’ professional confidence and career aspirations. These conclusions are supported by data drawn from an objective-based evaluation of the Remote Sensing for Hazard Mitigation and Natural Resource Protection project, which supported the PCMI students. Instruments employed in the project assessment include the Intercultural Development Inventory, exit surveys, individual qualitative interviews, postparticipation tracking, and a comparison group survey. The small participant population and relatively short project duration, however, limit the definitiveness of the conclusions and how broadly they can be applied. These first 10 yr of this unique program have provided many lessons on the administration of a nontraditional international master’s degree program, including the difficulties of applying research to international development, funding, and advising students serving abroad in the Peace Corps. While the career paths of the program’s graduates remain in progress, the students’ unique skills and experiences are likely to be in demand given the global scope of many natural resource and environmental challenges.

The University of Missouri–Kansas City (UMKC) has been offering educational programs in waste management and environmental science for ~25 yr and has recently added a sustainability minor to its bachelor’s degree in environmental science and environmental studies. With collective input from students, faculty, administrators, and staff, the university has established a highly successful sustainability program geared toward attaining zero waste. Students enrolled in the Introduction to Waste Management class are required to work on a term project that involves performing a waste audit. For the past several years, students have been conducting waste audits at various buildings on the campus. The term project not only allows students to gain familiarity with the principles of waste audits, but it also provides valuable hands-on experience with the procedures used for conducting a waste audit, data collection, analyses, interpretation, and preparing a written report followed by an oral Power-Point presentation. These reports have played a key role in designing a successful recycling program at UMKC that led to its earning first place among 523 colleges and universities in the annual RecycleMania competition in 2013, as well as its inclusion in Sierra magazine’s listing of top 100 “green schools” in the country. This paper includes a profile of the university and a detailed discussion of the waste audit project, recycling program, and sustainability efforts, along with suggestions on how to implement successful recycling programs elsewhere.

Field experiences are the cornerstone of a successful geoscience education, but these activities can be difficult (if not impossible) to include in many geoscience courses due to practical concerns. Virtual field exercises, presented through a series of high-resolution zoomable panoramas created with a GigaPan® robotic camera mount and associated software, allow students to gain experience interpreting outcrops and landscapes when physical travel to a site is not feasible. Exercises incorporating GigaPan panoramas have been developed for a number of undergraduate courses at different levels within the geoscience curriculum. Students in introductory-level courses are presented with exercises that explore local geology and illustrate basic concepts such as faulting and cross-bedding. Exercises for intermediate-level courses include analysis of geomorphic features in relation to bedrock type, the influence of landforms on historical events, and interpretation of shear stress orientations and magnitudes from small-scale structural features in outcrop. More advanced exercises, utilizing multiple-tier panoramas that range from outcrop to thin-section scales, have been developed from existing field research projects. These examples represent the initial effort to develop an extensive catalog of interactive self-paced exercises that will be incorporated into classes across the geoscience curriculum.

We have developed object-oriented programming methods to enable avatar movement across the Google Earth surface in response to student actions. Students travel on their own, or in groups attached to a field vehicle avatar (a Jeep). Students communicate using text messages sent from their web pages to balloons that pop up from the avatars in Google Earth. Students can be located locally in a lab class or at great distances from one another, as in a distance education course. Our programming methods help to create a more engaging virtual field trip in which the students take the lead and decide where to go rather than simply reading text and viewing graphics in a tour designed by their instructor. The user interactivity via avatars is controlled by JavaScript and PHP. Since the position of each avatar is known, it is possible to track their movements and offer text-message advice when students stray off-task or wander about aimlessly. Our methods will be included in new virtual field trips being developed for Iceland, Hawaii, and other locations.

A Google Earth–based virtual field trip, part of an introductory geology class, has been developed to illustrate the geology of the Presidential Range, New Hampshire. During a class field trip to Mt. Washington, the highest peak in the Northeast, students record GPS locations of exposures and collect information in the form of field notes and digital images from outcrops. Students upload the GPS waypoints into Google Earth and their images into a class PicasaWeb album, and they also make video clips that are uploaded into a class YouTube account. In Google Earth, the students embed and geologically annotate their images and embed their video clips. The final product is a Google Earth .kmz file or what is termed a mashup. The mashup provides a permanent record of the excursion and, if made available on the Internet, allows any user the ability to easily view the geology at any time. Constructing the mashup from the real field trip initiated reflective, independent, student-motivated learning and group work using technology that the students regularly use and enjoy doing. The resulting mashups have been very good, with an appropriate level of geologic content for an introductory course. Grading, which normally is onerous, is actually enjoyable, entertaining, and easy.

Google Earth tours (GETs) are recorded flights around Google Earth. They are highly engaging to watch and have great potential for communicating spatially in a teaching environment. They also benefit from being easy for an educator to produce but they can be ineffective if they are designed poorly. With this in mind, in this paper we cover three main topics: (1) we consider how best to produce GETs, (2) we deconstruct them as a communication media and finally (3), we consider the larger educational context in which they are used. By reviewing literature relevant to these areas we produce 19 best practices for using GETs in education. The amount of evidence we can show in support of our best practices varies. Those that were generated by comparing GETs to the well-researched area of educational animations are highly reliable because they are based on empirical evidence. Those associated with the virtual flights between locations within a GET are more open to interpretation as they have been less well studied. We conclude that further work should be focused on investigating virtual flight within a GET.

As part of a course objective to improve the geographic literacy of students in higher education, Penn State's Amazing Race , a modified version of Google Earth's application programming interface (API) demo game, Geo Whiz , engages students in learning physical geography within a Google Earth browser plug-in. Students navigate around the Earth to identify on the globe the locations of various countries, major cities, United States national parks, and locations with features of geological significance. To better achieve the learning goal, several game elements were incorporated into the game interface: a timer to encourage concentration, a ranking board with scores of all players to motivate students to improve and to assess learning results, and a replay function for instructors to review students' performance and specific difficulties. Google Earth API is used to control the Earth movements and map display, while custom JavaScript code adds the function of a timer, recording/playback, and score keeping. Google Earth's browser plug-in does not provide a layer that contains political boundaries without state and country labels, so one additional feature added to The Amazing Race is Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)–published boundary data without the names of world countries and U.S. states converted to a zipped Keyhole Markup Language (KMZ) file. The framework of this game can be easily exported for application to other disciplines for various student levels and ages.

Google Earth–based learning activities have become increasingly popular among K–12 educators in recent years. However, most of these activities are short-term, singular events within a more traditional curriculum and involve students' passive observation of pre-developed Google Earth “tours.” The Cyber-Enabled Earth Exploration (CE3) project is developing an immersive, Google Earth–based, middle school curriculum on plate tectonics. The curriculum is designed to scaffold students' technical skills, analytical abilities, and scientific content knowledge, as well as increase students' understandings about the nature of science. Through the curriculum, students progress from making simple observations in the Google Earth environment to using Google Earth as a transformative data analysis tool. Here, we describe how the curriculum was developed, its essential elements, and how it was received by students in grades five through nine. Results including teachers' reflections and student notebook entries reveal what skills and concepts were most challenging for students at each grade level and provide a preliminary roadmap for designing a scope and sequence for using Google Earth to teach core concepts related to volcanoes, earthquakes, and plate tectonics in the middle school classroom.

The Northern Environmental Education Development (NEED) project was a transnational geo-education resource development initiative cooperated by four European countries: Ireland, Finland, Norway, and Iceland. NEED supported the development of novel geological information resources, and the establishment of geo-education networks in the four project regions. An analysis of the national geography and science curriculum in each region was conducted. This analysis identified which geographic learning skills were common to each curriculum. The development of innovative geographic information system (GIS) resources to help support the development of geographic skills was considered a potentially valuable outcome of the NEED project. Google Earth was chosen as the technology with which to develop and serve the GIS information and learning resources. The resultant Google Earth learning resources provide free access to geoscientific information about the project regions for educators and students. While the development of these learning resources represents an important step in providing locally relevant geo-educational resources, further research is necessary to determine the pedagogical effectiveness of the learning content.

Google Earth is a free, easy-to-use geobrowser that has become a popular tool for observing planet Earth. Several features within Google Earth can enhance teaching of geomorphology concepts. The ability to tilt a scene and view a landscape three-dimensionally, along with the capability to make measurements and construct an elevation profile, can greatly facilitate the identification and characterization of land-forms and geomorphic mapping. Historical imagery allows users to access and analyze imagery dating back to the 1940s in some locations. This time-series of imagery is useful for studying natural and anthropogenic geomorphic processes and change. In addition to the geospatial data provided by Google Earth, supplementary data such as U.S. Geological Survey topographic or geologic maps, can be imported and easily georeferenced to provide an opportunity for more comprehensive analysis. Although not as powerful as commercial geographic information system (GIS) software, Google Earth is a dynamic venue for students to explore and analyze the geomorphology of the entire planet.

This study reports on the development of a web-based hydrologic educational system (HydroViz) that supports students' learning in hydrology or related earth science subjects. HydroViz ( http://hydroviz.cilat.org/hydro/ ) is designed as a virtual hydrologic observatory and is based on the integration of field data, remote sensing observations, and computer simulations of hydrologic variables and processes. HydroViz can run on a typical personal computer with Internet access and does not require any specific software package, which makes it easy to utilize. HydroViz employs the free Google Earth browser-based plug-in and its JavaScript application programming interface (API) to enable presentation of geospatial data layers in Google Earth and embed them in web pages that have the same look and feel of Google Earth. The decision to use Google Earth within the HydroViz project was driven by the great deal of geospatial data and visual capabilities it provides for hydrologic educational applications. Besides being freely accessible to a wide user community, Google Earth offers the ability to place and visualize hydrologic technical information on a three-dimensional model of Earth, which facilitates students' interactive and visually supported learning. Within a HydroViz setting, students can use Google Earth navigation capabilities to explore the watershed, either on their own or by using the embedded inquiry-based investigations and the supporting layers of hydrologic information. Cascading style sheets (CSS) and hypertext markup language (HTML) describe the look and formatting of each HydroViz web page. With the aid of Google Earth API, it was also possible to create customized buttons and panels for students to interact with and display the data. HydroViz is populated with several educational modules that range from basic activities (e.g., exploring watershed characteristics) to advanced analysis of field data and simulations. Each module is self-contained where instructions and technical questions are embedded within the same screens that show the watershed and its visual displays. HydroViz has been implemented in several classrooms, and evaluation data showed its potential value as a tool for supporting learning.

Two sets of learning activities in Google Earth were developed for use by geoscience majors and non-science majors. The first activity aimed to foster undergraduate students' understanding of the geography and basic geology of Iceland. We tested the efficacy of this activity for learning with 300 undergraduates from a university in the southeastern part of the United States. In terms of post- versus pre-test scores we found: (1) overall learning gains when collapsing over type of prior knowledge and gender, (2) no differences in learning gains when comparing those with prior coursework in geology or geography to other students without such prior coursework, and (3) no differences in learning gains when comparing males and females. In terms of items completed during the lab exercise, again we found no differences by prior coursework (prior geology, prior geography, or none), and no differences by gender. Lastly, moderate positive correlations were found between students' pre-test and post-test scores, as well as between students' embedded lab scores and post-test scores. For the second activity, we developed a laboratory activity about the classic Tonga region of the west Pacific in order to support undergraduate students' understanding of: (1) the physical geography of the Tonga Subduction System, (2) the dynamic geological processes involved in plate movement, subduction, magmatic arc evolution, and trench rollback, and (3) geological processes resulting from subduction, including volcanism, and earthquake formation. Using the program called Sketch-Up, we created 3-D COLLADA (three-dimensional COLLAborative Design Activity) models that are viewable as four-dimensional animations in the Google Earth API (application programming interface; a web-based version of Google Earth) to help demonstrate several geophysical processes. These animations potentially have a wide range of learning application from basic to more abstract ideas. Specifically, the learning objects created involve the Pacific Plate subducting underneath the Australian Plate in the Tonga Region. These are designed to help show subduction, active and dormant volcanoes, back-arc spreading, trench rollback, and migration of the tear point that marks the northern termination of the subduction system. We tested the efficacy of this activity with 127 undergraduates from a university in the southeastern part of the United States. In terms of post- versus pre-test scores we found: (1) overall learning gains when collapsing over type of prior knowledge and gender, (2) no differences in learning gains when comparing those with prior coursework in geology or geography to other students without this prior coursework; and (3) no differences in learning gains when comparing males and females. For the lab activity itself, we found no differences by prior coursework (geology and/or geography versus none), but found a gender difference favoring males; however this learning did not show up as statistically significant at post-test (as previously mentioned). Lastly, moderate positive correlations were found between students' pre-test and lab scores. Data is discussed with respect to Google Earth's utility to convey basic geoscience principles to non-geology undergraduates and its potential impact on public understanding. This is important and aligned with many current educational reform efforts (the American Association for the Advancement of Science, National Science Education Standards), which call for broader scientific literacy.

Expert geoscientists think in terms of systems that involve multiple processes with complex interactions. Earth system science has become increasingly important at the professional level, and an understanding of systems is a key learning goal at all levels of the earth science curriculum. In this paper, research in the cognitive and learning sciences is brought to bear on the question of how students learn systems thinking and on the challenges of developing effective instructional programs. The research suggests that learning systems concepts is difficult and that it involves extended learning progressions, requiring structured curricular integration across levels of K–16 instruction. Following a discussion of these challenges, current instructional innovations are outlined, and an agenda for needed research on learning and teaching systems thinking is proposed.