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Welcome to the Chemical Education Xchange (ChemEd X)! We hope to strengthen the community of chemistry educators by providing learning resources and forums for discussion and collaboration on our interactive platform. Take a look, and join in.
Based on some interactions here on ChemEd X and Twitter, I have been looking for ways to have students generate more questions, ideas, and investigation methods. (See a list of relevant links below.) Some of this is inspired by Argument Driven Inquiry, while some of it is simply my own quest to move further away from being the sole source of information in the class. In this blog post, I would like to talk about how I addressed gas laws using Atomsmith Classroom Online as an investigative tool in place of lab work I did previously using the Vernier gas pressure sensor.
Recently, my district made a commitment to helping its teachers reflect and rethink their grading and assessment practices. One of the phrases I kept hearing throughout our staff professional development sessions was authentic assessment. I understood (and agreed with) the basic premise—create more opportunities for students to perform tasks that demonstrate meaningful application of essential knowledge and skills. Doing so involves going beyond, or even potentially replacing, traditional summative assessments at the end of each unit.
Matt Vonk and Peter Bohacek have just created a handful of new chemistry activities that are based on interactive high-resolution video. These classroom-ready experiments have interactive tools so that students can perform the analysis and record data themselves. In some cases, students can even change variables.
All too often teachers use POGIL activities as worksheets when the teacher is absent, busy work to review a topic, or handouts for homework. However, using the POGIL activities in this manner does not allow the students to reap all the benefits of the activity. This article is designed to give you a glimpse into what the POGIL process can do for you.
Over the last two years, the Official AP Chemistry Community forum on the College Board website has been largely, though not completely, displaced by the formation of a Facebook group called National AP Chemistry Teachers that now boasts 1,962 members.
Placing Chemistry into a World Context
The April 2018 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education is now available online to subscribers. Topics featured in this issue include: service-learning, safety, investigating student understanding of solutions, environmental chemistry, green chemistry, waste management, acid-base chemistry, natural products, materials science, activities and laboratory investigations, teaching resources, diving into the archives: marine chemistry.
If you have never attended an official Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) training, you may consider doing so this summer. Many educators mention they have used POGIL activities. The POGIL pedagogy is not simply students completing worksheets. It requires training to implement it in order to achieve the desired effects of developing students process skills along with providing the opportunity for students to self discover content through collaborative roles.
