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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.
Consider helping the AAAS Project 2061 pilot their newly developed assessment tasks that measure students' ability to use the three dimensions outlined by the Next Generation Science Standards - science and engineering practices, crosscutting concepts, and disciplinary core ideas related to energy. Elementary, middle, and high school science teachers and college/university professors teaching in the U.S. that have students in 4th through 12th grade or undergraduate students and are willing to pilot these assessment tasks with their students are invited to register.
A solid grasp of proportional thinking is crucial to being able to solve all sorts of problems in chemistry as well as “real life” situations. While many students seem to intuitively understand that one mole is equal to 6.022 x 1023 particles when the analogy is drawn to a dozen eggs, for some, this sort of equality is a puzzling mystery.
I ran a multi-day poll on Twitter that was designed to be a fun way to determine the “best” element on the periodic table. I’m sharing about the poll here on ChemEdX in case others might want to try something similar in their classrooms. The poll was run tournament-style, fashioned after NCAA Basketball’s March Madness. The event was called #MarchMatterMadness. Just like basketball’s March Madness tournament, four different “regions” were set up, and each element was seeded into brackets according to atomic number.
