Working in groups, students learn to navigate a virtual globe, read geophysical data, and assess plate tectonic models. They prepare by studying about plate tectonics from their notes or from the text, and then apply that knowledge to real tectonic settings on the virtual globe. Students drag 3D models out of the subsurface and compare real data to model interpretations. They can also substitute their own sketches for our images.

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The Fold Analysis Challenge (FAC) uses Google Earth and a customized Google Earth interface to help students visualize the orientations of eroded dipping sedimentary layers and to visualize the geometries of folds in layered rocks. The FAC uses spectacularly exposed layers at Sheep Mountain, Wyoming and takes students through a variety of activities to help them visualize the shape and orientation of the fold structure responsible for the patterns that can be seen in Google Earth at Sheep Mountain. After working with Sheep Mountain, students apply what they have learned to interpret other fold structures in the Bighorn Basin. Once students have become adept at visualizing dipping layers and folds, they are ready to use the same strategies for visualizing fold structures anywhere in the world where they are well exposed in Google Earth.

Provenance: Kristen St. John, James Madison University
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The Tour Stops are arranged in a teaching sequence, starting with continental rifting and incipient ocean basin formation in East Africa and the Red Sea and ending with the oldest surviving fragments of oceanic crust. Transforms and fracture zones are introduced, also abandoned basins, convergent boundaries, and marginal basins. Instructors can easily change the sequence of stops to suit their courses using the Google Earth desktop app or by editing the KML file.

In the age of publicly funded space exploration involving several national space agencies, knowing about the highest mountain in the solar system is as basic to geospatial literacy as knowing about the highest mountain on Earth is to classical geography. This activity is a Google Earth grand tour of the terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, the Moon, and Mars) and guides students to explore atmospheres, magnetospheres, landscapes, and interiors. Each tour commences with an astronaut's overview from space, and then it zooms in on specific, media-rich placemarks, and ends with a concluding view from space. This is intended to help students develop a sense of relative position and relative size of features on other planets.

Reasons for the seasons (RFTS for short) is an interactive learning resource that leverages the popular Google Earth virtual globe. It is designed to help students and members of the public visualize and understand the multiple factors that influence Earth's seasons.