Personalize learning with MasteringGeology™
MasteringGeology is an online homework, tutorial, and assessment program designed to work with this text to engage students and improve results. Interactive, self-paced coaching activities provide individualized coaching to help students stay on track. With a wide range of activities available, students can actively learn, understand, and retain even the most difficult concepts.
- Pre-Lecture Reading Quizzes ensure that students complete the assigned reading before class and stay on track with reading assignments. Reading Quizzes are 100% mobile ready and can be completed by students on smartphones and tablets.
- Encounter Activities provide rich, interactive explorations of geology and earth science concepts using KMZ media files from Google Earth™. Dynamic assessment questions—related to core geology concepts—include hints and specific wrong-answer feedback to help coach students towards mastery of the concepts while improving their geospatial reasoning skills.
- Geoscience Animations illuminate the most difficult-to-visualize topics from across the physical geosciences, such as solar system formation, the hydrologic cycle, plate tectonics, glacial advance and retreat, global warming, and more. The animation activities include audio narration, a text transcript, and assignable questions with specific wrong-answer feedback.
- GeoTutor Activities help students master the most challenging geology concepts with highly visual, data-rich, kinesthetic activities focused on critical thinking and the application of core geoscience concepts.
- UPDATED! SmartFigures. The 13th edition now incorporates mobile Quick Response (QR) code media links to over 200 videos and animations, giving readers immediate access to five types of dynamic media to help visualize physical processes and concepts. SmartFigures extend the print book to bring geology to life, are available in the MasteringGeology Study Area and for assignment with quizzes, and are also linked from the eText.
- NEW! SmartFigure Mobile Field Trips take students to iconic geologic locations as they accompany geologist–pilot–photographer–author Michael Collier in the air and on the ground. Students can see and learn about iconic locations around North America and beyond that relate to concepts in the chapter. New Mobile Field Trips for the 13th edition include:
- Formation of a Water Gap
- Ice Sculpts Yosemite
- Fire and Ice Land
- Dendrochronology
- Desert Geomorphology
- NEW! Project Condor Videos capture stunning footage of the Mountain West region with a quadcopter and a GoPro camera. Videos include annotation, sketching, and narration to help students learn about monoclines, streams, terraces, and so much more.
- UPDATED! GigaPan Activities allow students to take advantage of a virtual field experience and perform detailed image analysis using ultra high-resolution photographic technology developed by Carnegie Mellon University in conjunction with NASA.
- UPDATED! SmartFigure Animations. SmartFigure Animations are brief videos, created by text illustrator Dennis Tasa that animate a process or concept depicted in the textbook’s figures. This technology allows students to view moving figures rather than static art to depict how a geologic process truly moves throughout time.
- SmartFigure Videos. These short video clips help illustrate such diverse subjects as mineral properties and the structure of ice sheets.
- SmartFigure Tutorial Videos present students with a 3- to 4-minute feature (mini-lesson) prepared and narrated by Professor Callan Bentley. Each lesson examines and explains the concepts illustrated by the figure. With over 100 SmartFigure Tutorials inside the text, students have a multitude of ways to enjoy art that teaches.
- UPDATED! MapMaster. GIS-inspired interactive map activities help to enhance students’ geographic literacy and spatial reasoning skills.
- Learning Catalytics™ helps you generate class discussion, customize your lecture, and promote peer-to-peer learning with real-time analytics. As a student response tool, Learning Catalytics uses students’ smartphones, tablets, or laptops to engage them in more interactive tasks and thinking.
- NEW! Upload a full PowerPoint® deck for easy creation of slide questions
- NEW! Team names are no longer case sensitive
- Help your students develop critical thinking skills
- Monitor responses to find out where your students are struggling
- Rely on real-time data to adjust your teaching strategy
- Automatically group students for discussion, teamwork, and peer-to-peer learning
- Dynamic Study Modules help students study effectively on their own by continuously assessing their activity and performance in real time. Here's how it works: students complete a set of questions with a unique answer format that also asks them to indicate their confidence level. Questions repeat until the student can answer them all correctly and confidently. Once completed, Dynamic Study Modules explain the concept using materials from the text. These are available as graded assignments prior to class, and accessible on smartphones, tablets, and computers. NEW! Instructors can now remove questions from Dynamic Study Modules to better fit their course.
- NEW! An eText upgrade option to Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change, 2nd Edition, by Michael Mann and Lee Kump. In just over 200 pages, this text presents and expands upon the essential findings of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report on the risk of climate change brought on by humans, in a visually stunning way. Scientific findings that provide validity to the implications of climate change are presented in clear-cut graphic elements, striking images, and understandable analogies. The 2nd Edition covers the latest climate change data and scientific consensus from the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report and integrates mobile media links to online media. The text is available in various eText formats, including an eText upgrade option from MasteringGeology courses.
- NEW! eText 2.0 optimized for mobile.
- eText 2.0 mobile app offers offline access and can be downloaded for most iOS and Android phones/tablets from the Apple App Store or Google Play.
- Seamlessly integrated videos and other rich media.
- Accessible (screen-reader ready).
- Configurable reading settings, including resizable type and night reading mode.
- Instructor and student note-taking, highlighting, bookmarking, and search.