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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.
The Journal of Chemical Education (JCE) has a long history of supporting chemistry instructors by providing high quality information. As a world leader in the publication of primary research in chemical education, as well as a source of many practical ideas for teaching chemistry, JCE provides both broad and deep coverage of teaching and learning the central science. The presentation will provide a brief outline of the history and structure of JCE, provide examples of exemplary high school level content and how teachers have used it, and show attendees how to best take advantage of the new AACT benefit of 25 free ACS downloads.
Augmented reality is a type of technology that uses an app to turn a hidden QR code into a three dimensional object on a screen as viewed by your camera. I have heard that there are biology related augmented reality pictures. You can look at a heart on a piece of paper but when it is viewed through the app it appears to be beating and you can follow the blood flow with the camera. Elements 4D attempts to bring augmented reality to chemistry.
With its focus on geology and chemistry, this year’s National Chemistry Week (NCW) celebration is a chance to show students that Chemistry Rocks! An upcoming free webinar will show you resources that make it easy to integrate geology and chemistry.
Erica Jacobsen shares highlights from the September 2017 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education that are of special interest to high school chemistry teachers.
The Flinn website sums up their software with these sentences, "Flinn’s Online Chemventory™ Inventory Management System(link is external) is a cloud-based lab management system that allows multiple users on multiple devices from multiple locations! Available as a 1-Year, 3-Year or 5-Year license.
Enhancing Student Success in Chemistry
The September 2017 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education is now available online to subscribers. Topics featured in this issue include: student thinking and student success; computational thinking; using games to teach: developing and making tools for teaching; understanding catalysis; green chemistry; food chemistry in the laboratory; exploring edible fats and oils; NMR spectroscopy; laboratory cross-course collaboration; physical chemistry; distilling the archives: scents and smellability; announcing the search for the next Editor-in-Chief.
The first chapter of every middle and high school science textbook I have ever seen contains a section on “the scientific method.” As a result, by the time your students get to you they are probably very adept at reciting how science is done, or at least how they think it is done. A short list of easy steps is presented which always, incomprehensibly begins with forming a hypothesis (which some people insist must be an if-then statement), and then BOOM! Science has happened. This oversimplification and the dry exercises I’ve seen used to “teach” it led me to dispense with teaching the scientific method explicitly for several years. Rather, I wanted my students to gain an understanding of science by doing science, as best as we can replicate in a classroom, though inquiry labs, class discussions, and defending claims with evidence.
