We teach it, some celebrate it, and we try to make it engaging for our students. What is it? The mole concept and Mole Day! So how do we make it engaging for our students? Let me introduce #molympics.
If you are on Twitter and follow #chemchat, you may have recently seen some beautiful, rotating 3D atomic and molecular models from Dave Doherty @atomsNMolecules. I was curious about these models and after contacting Dave, he introduced me to The Atomic Dashboard.
On September 2, the American Association of Chemistry Teachers (AACT) launched its official website, loaded with lots of resources and member benefits. If you visit teachchemistry.org, you will find many great tools that K–12 teachers of chemistry can use in their classrooms; the new online periodical, Chemistry Solutions; professional development opportunities; and a community for you, in addition to many other benefits.
Earlier this week, I saw a tweet showing a compilation of apps entitled the Periodic Table of iPad apps (https://sjunkins.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/iste-posters-001.jpg).
I am enrolled in a Modeling Instruction Workshop in Michigan. We have only four days left of the 15 scheduled days. I had planned to blog about the workshop every day, but I found that it was difficult for me to articulate my thoughts quickly enough to post daily.
In a previous post, I discussed the work of my grade 10 class as we read the non-fiction story, The Case of the Frozen Addicts. We've continued working our way through the book, taking one class every two weeks to delve into the issues presented. Just this week, we engaged in a fish-bowl discussion. To help steer the discussion, I started the class with a quick warm-up activity asking students to suggest topics or questions that they would want to talk through in the fish bowl.
Suitable for Online Instruction: An independent study on the chemistry topic of coordination compounds and complex ions suitable for AP Chemistry and first-year college chemistry students is presented. Originally published 3/20/2014.
Whiteboarding can be a powerful tool for increasing student engagement when it is implemented well. The success of a whiteboarding activity greatly depends on how well the instructor focuses the student interaction and guides the discussion.
In my first post I mentioned using the Chemistry Modeling Curriculum (CMC) in my classroom. Although Modeling Instruction (MI) has been around for over 20 years, I discovered it during a workshop in the summer of 2010.
This is a series of experiments, PhET Interactive Simulation activities, and clicker questions to relate macroscopic and molecular representations of homogenenous solutions. Graphing skills are also used.
