• WebCT at CU can host a class website. After a brief tutorial, you can have a site with discussion boards, student access to their grades, interactive quizes (both graded for real and practice questions on specific material), and your material with a lot of navigation tools (searches, next page, last page, etc.). Graders can be given limited access to input grades. Material can range from straight text chunks in different files to Shockwave, Flash, movies, etc.
• Virtual Earth (CU version--this is a popular name). At present, an interactive minicourse on thermal convection. Maintained by Shijie Zhong in Physics.
• Group or individual interactive homework could be developed from some cgi scripts made for GEOL1020. With revised scripts in 2005, there is now a description and how-to use these scripts . Dan Mitchell or Craig Jones could help guide modifications; the existing scripts use some simple text files to define students and passwords, put them into groups, and show them information collected by their group. Students "ask" questions from pulldown menus; answers get added to the group's knowledge base. For the pre-2005 version, go through this page and login as testXX with password being 000XX and XX being between 1 and 25 (groups 1-21 are real student groups from Spring 2001 or Spring 2003; 22-25 are empty). (This particular example had each student "examine" the characteristics of one formation; the group then pooled their answers to write a geologic history. If somebody else hasn't tried, you can ask a question through the pulldown menu and checkbox at the bottom of the page). The 2005 scripts add requesting a topic question for each group and a report writing capability at the end.

• "Virtual Structure rock" (Craig Jones) is a rock that has been photographed and made into a virtual object (QuickTime). You can spin it about (with more photos, you could roll it up and down).
• Isostasy demo (Craig Jones) shows how changing the thickness of the crust or mantle lid effects elevations. One version just shows the columns of rock, the other shows weight with depth to illustrate how the weights become the same in the asthensophere. Shockwave plugin required.
• Magnetic field of the Earth (Craig Jones) will show the orientation and intensity of the Earth's field at the point where your cursor is; clicking reverses the field. Shockwave plugin required.
• Modern day Plate Setting of Western U.S. (Craig Jones) shows shaded topography. Clicking in checkboxes will turn on or off various overlays (earthquakes, mantle buoyancy, potential energy, plate boundaries, position of a "typical" fold and thrust).
• Paleogeography "movies" of the southwestern US and the western hemisphere (Craig Jones) based upon maps made at Northern Arizona by Ron Blakely. Paleozoic and Precambrian, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic pages are online; a single complete Director file is available from Craig. (Warning: these are big files (several Mb) and require the Shockwave plugin).
• Animations/interactive webpages of National Park geology (Interactive Geology Project) has some developing animations of Colorado National Monument, Grand Canyon, and other places.
• Paleogeographic movie of Rocky Mountain Cretaceous shorelines developed by Educational Technology House for Paul Weimar.
• San Juans Volcanoes movie developed by Educational Technology House for Paul Weimar.
• Interactive Photo safari shows photo thumbnails on a schematic map of the western US at different times in the geologic past. Note there is also a version which might load faster to start but is slower to change ages.
• Receiver function analysis (Shockwave; Craig Jones) and a demo of how incidence angle effects Ps and reverberations differently.
• EarthBrowser software (shareware, $20 PC and Mac) displays the globe in an orthographic view. It has fairly good resolution satellite maps of the Earth as the base for its globe (the high res stuff only available if you've bought the code) and updates recent earthquakes, active volcanoes, clouds, and weather from the web. You can have the globe rotating, can grab it and spin it to look at any part, zoom in and out, etc. And clicking on an earthquake brings up the NEIC page on that earthquake; clicking a volcano brings up the Volcano World page on that volcano. Recently upgraded to 1 km resolution on the satellite image.
• ScienceProf.com (commercial) has a large number of Earth-science computer and web-based animation/demonstration materials with physical geology, intro structure, geophysics, strain analysis and microfabric packets

Classroom demonstration

• SeisMac allows owners of recent model Mac laptops (MacBooks, MacBookPro, some of the more recent Powerbooks) to use their laptop as a low-resolution strong-motion accelerometer (good enough to display footsteps and the like in many situations).
• Paul Boni (1B35) presently is in charge of several of the physical demos that can be used (usually in 1010):
  • Isostasy
  • Earthquake (buildings on shake table)
  • Magnetism / magnetic fields (magnets and iron filings on overhead)
  • Spreading centers
  • Radioactive decay (Ba¹³⁷ with a halflife of only a few minutes)
  • Porosity - permeability
  • Sand box / compression of strata
  • Refraction (water tank with a little opaques and a laser pointer)
  • And the ever popular slinky
• Several demos are described on a separate page developed by Hartmut Spetzler and Joe Eichenauer
  • Thermal Magnetization and then Some. that shows how magnetization is reversed with a needle and thermoremanence
  • Gravity Anomalies.used to illustrate how gravity anomalies relate to densities with depth
  • Body and Surface Forces, Sedimentation and Convection.using spheres descending in a fluid at different terminal velocities
  • Partial Melting
  • Lava Lamps and Convection
  • Ocean Floor Spreading and Magnetization
  • Radioactive Decay
  • The Classic Slinky
  • The Earthquake Simulator
  • The Dynamo Machine
  • Electricity and Magnetism
  • The Laser Refractor

Electronic resources

Stuff you could incorporate in class, either indices to resources or local resources.

• Scanned version of the department slide library was developed under Roger Bilham's and Becky Bendick's guidance.
• ITS's database of videos is online at http://www.colorado.edu/ITS/videolibrary.html. You can search for videos and set up delivery of the videos online.
• Scanned versions of many 1:250,000 geologic maps in Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and SE California are in the hands of Craig Jones.
• Tectonics of the western US site (Craig Jones) was developed by GEOL5700 students, Fall 1999-2005, and has some useful material. It will be upgraded with time (but the material is mainly student-generated).
• Geology in the news (UC Berkeley) is a handy place to catch new developments you might want to discuss in class.

• ScienceProf.com (commercial) has a large number of Earth-science computer analysis materials with physical geology, intro structure, geophysics, strain analysis and microfabric packets.
• Geoscience Concept Inventory is the list of questions developed by Libarkin and Anderson to evaluate physical geology instruction along with a description of the development techniques.