Last Thursday (11/6/14) I attended a workshop on NGSS through our local RESA (essentially an ISD for the county/region). I’d like to touch on some of the things I took away from this workshop and will post again after the next follow-up workshops in December and March.
xkcd is a nerdy Internet daily cartoon that is written and drawn by a former NASA "roboticist". The subject matter is all over the map [yesterday's (11/4/14) is about TypographicChemistry], but tends to favor physics and computing. He encourages readers of the cartoon strip to send him outrageous questions, and he supplies outrageous but scientifically accurate responses. Some of the best of these have be come a surprising NYT Best Seller.
Communicating the Value of Chemistry The October 2014 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education is available online to subscribers [http://pubs.acs.org/toc/jceda8/91/10]. The October issue features sustainability; celebrating National Chemistry Week 2014 with articles on food and candy; increasing chemistry understanding for the nonscientist; nanochemistry; investigating materials: plastic & paper; exploring sound; research on chemical equilibrium instruction and student understanding of scale.
Advanced Placement Chemistry Special Issue The September 2014 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education is available online to subscribers [http://pubs.acs.org/toc/jceda8/91/9]. The September issue features a special issue of 20 contributions on Advanced Placement (AP) Chemistry as well as many other articles to help students learn chemistry.
Using Models for Learning Chemistry The August 2014 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education is now available online to subscribers at http://pubs.acs.org/toc/jceda8/91/8. The August issue contains content to spark thinking about models and how to foster meaningful learning in chemistry classrooms and improve student understanding.
The new AP Chemistry curriculum is in the second year of use. Photoelectron spectroscopy (PES) is a topic that generated much discussion because it is an addition to the curriculum. Jamie Benigna of Michigan teaches AP Chemistry, is an AP reader and recently wrote an article about PES for the Journal of Chemistry Education Special Issue. The article discusses the rationale for including PES in the course, explains some background of PES and provides strategies for including PES in your own course. This article is offered as a free preview of the AP Special Issue.
Wishing all of you a very Mole-tastic day today! Enjoy each 6.02 x 10^23 moment!!
Hi everyone, I’ve spent much of my time over the past 10 years since moving from high school to college chemistry teaching thinking about whether I made the right choice in doing so.
In my previous post, I shared the general formatting of the videos I create for my IB Chemistry course within which I utilize the flipped model. Within that blog post, I mentioned that I use Google Forms to collect data about the videos, and I'd like to offer some thoughts on this as a tool with many uses.
You’ve heard the old saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” How many words for a smell? A single whiff of a familiar scent can whisk me back into the past. Wash my hands with Dove soap—I find myself standing in my grandmother’s house. Walk by someone wearing Eternity cologne—I’m back in high school with an old boyfriend. Spray out a foamy mound of Barbasol shaving cream—I’m standing at an exhibit booth talking about the Journal of Chemical Education (JCE). That was a fragrant flashback moment I had last month. As I followed my nose to the past, it led me to a solution for the present.
