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Organic chemistry was when I fell in love with chemistry. Also known as Chem 210 at the University of Michigan, it was the first time I actually started to connect what was going on at the nanoscopic level to the macroscopic world. Since then, I’ve been hooked.
Although each individual educator has their own approach to improving their curriculum, many will be spending their time off aligning their curriculum to the Next Generation Science Standards. The idea of revising curriculum for each and every course can be daunting as educators try to identify a common theme that can be applied throughout the entire department. So where do we start? How do we thread a common theme for the professional development provided in our subject area?
A complete understanding of why each element has a particular electronic configurations is a very complex subject. Even so, some confusion regarding the electronic configurations of the elements may be alleviated by looking at the physical properties of the electronic orbitals.
In one of my last blog posts I wrote of how I sometimes enjoy ending a unit with a series of demonstrations and using them to elicit a dialog between the students and myself to check for understanding. It is always a fascinating experience to hear the misconceptions that many students have the day before the test.
Senioritis. Seniors come down with it. Underclassmen claim it's contagious. Teachers do not appear to be exempt. Let's face it: Summer is coming and we all know it. We all want it. We are all ready for it! However, the calendar declares it is not here yet. What do you do when your students are unmotivated?
A raspberry pi is the one of the world's cheapest computers. It is a $35 computer that runs off of an eight gig SD card. Anyone can program it with Python (a relatively simple coding lanquage) and it can do small things.
In this blog post I'll describe a recent attempt at using BCA Tables for teaching stoichiometry. I discuss the method I used with one introductory chemistry class to teach both the algorithm method and BCA tables to learn more about a technique I've been curious about for a while.
As many teachers are preparing to teach online, we are revisiting posts from the ChemEd X archives like this one that might be of help. The author has updated this activity by adding notes specifically to help those teaching remotely. This post about Classkick was originally published April 22, 2016. The platform is now all web based and Doug has compiled a list of public assignments that you are free to modify for your own use.
Previously I wrote about taking part in a district-wide high school blended learning pilot. You can read about it here. I received my Chromebook cart near the end of February/beginning of March. A little late but just in time for the periodicity unit I was planning as a blended unit. The following is a breakdown of how I designed the unit.
A simple multi-faceted lab activity for the first week of AP Chemistry.