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I need to prepare a face-to-face tutorial for one of my S104 "Exploring science" groups.  This is for the Earth science material of Book 6. The difficulty is that these students should only have studied the two chapters of the book. In fact, many of them may still be working on the TMA covering the previous book. I need to find or devise Earth science activities that everyone can engage with. Fortunately the students have already studied one book of Earth science so there will be some familiarity with the topic.

I would like to include an activity on extracting the sequence of events from a geological cross-section. Students find this a difficult task, and it is tested in the TMA.

A review of my previous tutorials showed that I had not done a tutorial at this stage of the module for many years. On the S104 tutors' resources area I found two activities that I had not used before: modelling radioactive decay and reviewing a piece of writing (a 'student answer' to a TMA question) on the connection between plate tectonics and the rock cycle.  The review focuses on writing skills, but also addresses geology. Either would be useable.

The decay activity would help the students understand the maths of the topic but requires one hundred identical coins. A search turned up fifty - and I can live with that!

The writing activity provides useful discussion of the three types of rock, but does not actually provide information on the plate tectonics. I would need to add that. However this activity might be a waste of valuable face-to-face time, being well suited to a forum activity.

I searched for a geological cross-section question and eventually found one reasonably different from the one in the current TMA. This will allow me to discuss the principles without disclosing parts of the TMA answer. I was not able to access the S104 tutor notes for this question, so I drafted my own.

So, my plan is

• interpreting geological cross-section
• radioactive decay (needs 50 pennies, box for the pennies, graph paper
• review of 'essay' on plate tectonics and the rock cycle.

This provides a good mix of hand-on activity, group work, graph drawing, discussion of geological principles and writing skills.

I now need to package the materials into my folder for the session, print off copies of some sheets for  student handouts, and collect together the other materials I will need.

[21 March 2013]

The conclusions I have drawn from running the session are:

• It is practical to run an Elluminate activity using DVD resources and breakout room discussion.
• Interaction with students always takes much longer than I expect!
• Even when specifically asked to do a little bit of preparation to allow the tutorial to proceed some students did not do that.

I asked for student feedback on my tutor group forum. They reported that the work on the solar images and features was useful, and that it would have been useful to have longer in the breakout room for their discussion (which they liked).  They also suggested that it would be better to provide 'answer' slides for my review after the break out time, and not to wait so long for people to get organised accessing the DVD images.

I will take a harder line next time!