This empowering activity provides students the opportunity to drive their own lab experience. It allows students to perform research, execute lab techniques and identify an unknown substance.
Yvonne Clifford shares tips and ideas for making your high school chemistry course both interesting and rigorous.
On July 11, 2022, Nora Walsh shared tips and advice for integrating interactive notebooks into chemistry lessons. In this ChemEd X Talk she spoke on everything from organizing your classroom for notebooking to how to plan layouts, general and specific ideas for input and output, and some ideas on grading/scoring interactive notebooks. View a recording of Nora's presentation and access materials here.
Here is a great way to use spreadsheets to both collect student data and provide instant feedback during labs with quantitative data.
Looking for a great resource for using microscale practices in chemistry class?
Teaching during COVID was challenging; however, a few positive results surprisingly emerged. For one, Josh Kenney filmed a small library of chemistry lab videos for use in virtual chemistry labs after his school switched to remote learning. At first, he wasn't sure if he would continue to use those videos when his district returned to in-person instruction until he discovered that they would make excellent pre-lab assignments.
Students use a micro-scale method to extract caffeine from tea using dichloromethane. At the end of the activity, the students' dochloromethane extractions are pooled; the solvent is distilled after class for re-use.
Chad Husting explains how he used two hands on activities to get a sense of where his students were at within the realm of labwork and the scientific process as school began.
Michael Jansen reflects on a very common empirical formula lab that asks students to determine the empirical formula of MgxOy. He then explains how he continues to use it as a "successful failure", how he demonstrates an alternate procedure and leads his students to an important lesson.
After a year or more of virtual laboratory instruction due to pandemic restrictions in many colleges, a simple experiment has been designed to provide students returning to in-person lab instruction with the opportunity to gain hands-on experience reviewing basic chemistry laboratory apparatus and techniques.
