Just wondering if anyone has a contact to someone who can come out to schools to identify rock/mineral samples? I'm in the process of reorganising our rock stores, but its a little hard to organise when I don't know what they are (& teachers aren't confident to ID either)!
I'm around the Northern Beaches in Sydney Any help appreciated!
I feel hour pain anniek . I recon almost every school has a collection of rocks that are unidentified.
Nobody will chuck them out , but at the same time they are useless without names .
We had very good rock kits at my old school in NSW , but despite the labels , I could never match any of them to the collection of unlabelled ones we had .
I wish you luck . Maybe contact a local gem and mineral club. They might have a member that is keen to sort your samples.
Contact your nearest uni and ask if they have a geology unit. I was a gun for rock ID for a few years after uni, but if you don't use it, you lose it. Ask for a keen student to come out.
When I started here, I found asbestos and asbestos containing samples. It made me very nervous about our "random rock" boxes, so I did throw many away (the ones I knew were asbestos were collected, the ones I had no idea about went in the bin). Many of the samples we did have were not great examples, and some had been mixed. While we have a teacher qualified in Geology, no one had time to sort it all out.
We just did a geology PD with our lab tech group in Gippsland, I will see if I can find the links we were given. It was from james.driscoll@monash.edu James was great and there are ID pages and lesson plans he was happy to send us.
Any help appreciated!
