Ideas for teaching Continental Drift
This topic lends itself to 2 particular teaching strategies; webquests, and teaching through drawing or modeling.
- Webquest. (i.e.
Web-based references are provided for students to answer specific
questions). This is made a lot easier if students collect what they
find into OneNote. Here is a sample page of references and questions that could be made up into a Webquest.
Some of the web pages in the references could also be used simply
as a teaching tool. I'd suggest having the students work in groups to
complete one of the questions and then present their finding to the
class. Students could then assess whether the evidence is convincing.
- An introductory set of lessons could use the Interactives - Dynamic Earth site as a series of lessons that is used to provide students with some foundation knowledge to start into their Webquest. Alternatively these lessons could be interspersed in amongst lessons allocated to conduct their research.
An alternative teaching strategy is at the site: "Teaching Plate tectonics". It suggests using drawing as a teaching technique to teach about plate tectonics. Do not attempt to get students to draw using a touchpad, nor with a mouse. A class set of writing tables may be the way to go to use this teaching strategy. This could be interspersed with the lessons which are allocated for students to complete their web-quests. (My favourite program on the DERvices for drawing is Fireworks, but others such as Illustrator or Photoshop may be useful).View a movie demonstrating how to make an animation of continental drift. This would be taught by leading students through the process until they got the idea. The animation they produce is shown on the right. - A lesson could be completed using the Tectonic Boundaries learning object from TALE (Students use code X01U5). This
could also be provided as a resource for the Webquest, or used as a
formal lesson as a break from the Webquest. (Similarly a resource on Antarctica from TALE could be made available - students use code: X00QY).
- If students are not sure how to complete a Webquest, perhaps an example using the Tectonics Investigator downloadable from TALE (Students use code X07ZG) could be used to investigate why the Islands of Hawaii form a chain of islands.