NMITA Educational Activities

The following earth science and paleontology teaching activities have been developed to facilitate use of the biotic databases and the internet for teaching purposes. Some exercises were developed as lab activities for classes offered at the University of Iowa, whereas others are designed to accompany virtual field trips and museum visits.

Each activity is linked to resources on other web pages and is flexibly organized. Guiding questions or activities accompany the exercises, and these may be printed and distributed to a class and/or modified to meet individual needs. These activities assume that the user is familiar with computers and knows how to access the WWW.
 

• Florida Bay / Puerto Rico Field Trip Coral Lab

This lab is provided as a guide for identifying common shallow water Caribbean reef corals in preparation for a field trip. It includes two identification tools that can be used to identify specimens based on morphologic characters.
 
• Colonial Invertebrates

In this introductory lab students learn about sponges, stromatoporoids, corals, and bryozoans. The entire lab and related links are available on the web.
 
• Maps and Faunal Lists

Explore collecting localities to determine which species were present during the last 25 million years in the Dominican Republic. 

• Missing 'links' in bioinformatics education

Four lessons to accompany: Nehm, R.H. and A.F. Budd, in press. Missing 'links' in bioinformatics education. The American Biology Teacher.

• UASD Workshop March 2006