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You may have read Sarah Kong's recent blog post on inquiry on this site. I thought I would give a description of one way I incorporate inquiry learning into one of the chemistry courses I teach.
Who is Sarah Kong and why is she starting a blog for Chem Ed X about Inquiry?
Whenever possible, I try to begin a topic with something my students are familar with. For the introduction of Percent Composition in my general chemistry course, I brought in bags of Oreo cookies. Seeing the bags upon entering class was a great attention getter. If you are looking for ways to add more inquiry to your chemistry course, this a an example of how you can experiment with giving up a little control. Try it and see how it goes.
Having some experience in using and creating inquiry activities, I am getting questions from teachers looking for ways to add inquiry to their curriculum. My first tip is to take baby steps. I will continue to blog about ideas to help outline some of those steps. First, I am sharing some inquiry ideas from the last unit I taught in my high school general chemistry course along with providing some ideas for using the resources provided with a subscription to ChemEdX.
Cutting-Edge and Cross-Cutting: Connecting the Dots between Nanotechnology and High School Chemistry
In a recent editorial at JCE, my colleague Brett Criswell and I wrote about connecting the
I love the first week of school! I perform some of my favorite demonstrations and we jump right into activities that help to jumpstart the year and excite students about where we are headed. I am in the process of uploading many of those activities. I will list them here and you can check them out.
BCCE 2012 is just around the corner at Penn State University. Opening ceremonies begin on July 29th and the conference runs through August 2nd.
A periodic table project...
Chemistry Comes Alive! is JCE's outstanding collection of chemistry videos and images. This collection of 1,800 videos and thousands of images presents the chemistry as the star of the show. Migrating all of this great content into JCE Chemical Education Exchange is one of our first priorities.
Rebooting JCE Online into a new, interactive web CMS platform is a large undertaking. JCE Online has had a fairly long history, several contributors, and contains a lot of content. The content is typically static HTML and was created using numerous tools and methods. Some content is available only to subscribers.