Spreading Geodiversity awareness in schools through field trips and ICT

A research on the use of field trips and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is being carried out for spreading the value of Geodiversity in Secondary Schools. As a starting point, a multimedia product on 20 Italian geological tours, designed for analyzing Geodiversity at a regional scale, has been tested with teachers and students, in order to understand its effectiveness by using it solely indoor. In a second phase, teachers and students have been proposed to compare and integrate indoor and outdoor activities to approach Geodiversity directly at a local scale, by means of targeted field trips. For achieving this goal, during the field trips, students used their mobile devices (smartphone and tablet) equipped with free and/or open source applications (Epicollect, Trimble Outdoor Navigator). These tools allow to track field trips, to gather data (geomorphological observations and related photographs), and to elaborate them in the laboratory; a process useful for reasoning on concepts such as spatial and temporal scales and for comparing the real and the virtual experience. By taking awareness of the spatial and temporal scales related to landforms and geomorphic processes, as well as to the Man-Nature interactions, students realize the “dynamic dimension” of Geodiversity. As a consequence, students can perceive the geomorphological landscape as a changeable system over time, and therefore worthy of protection.