You have been there before. The best part of any professional development activity is the collaboration with other teachers. Hearing the struggles and successes of others helps us to articulate our own ideas and spark new excitement in our own curriculum. We hope to strengthen the community of chemistry educators and provide a place for discussion and collaboration right here at this site.
Summer is one of my favorite times as a teacher! Like most teachers I like to take a little time away from school, but, once I've rested a bit, its my favorite time to do research as well. I encourage you to take time this summer to explore labs and activities that you think may work for your classroom, but just didn't have time to examine with your busy teaching schedule.
The June 2013 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education is now available online [http://pubs.acs.org/toc/jceda8/90/6]. Some highlights from this issue are discussed. This latest issue of JCE plus the content of all past issues, volumes 1 through 90, are available at http://pubs.acs.org/jchemeduc.
Call for Symposia and Workshops for the 23rd BCCE at Grand Valley State University – Greener on the Grand: Empowering Chemical Educators for a Greener Tomorrow, August 3 – 7, 2014
I’d like to report on one of the end-of-year research projects that two of my general chemistry students completed during class this year. If you’d like read more about these end-of year research projects in general, click here.
Wow! Talk about an interesting idea! A very neat experiment, called “Hydroglyphics”, has been published by Philseok Kim, Jack Alvarenga, Joanna Aizenberg and Raymond Sleeper in the Journal of Chemical Education.
I came across a simple, yet interesting experiment that was first described by Elizabeth Sumner Walter in 2001. She merely had students pour water into a dish containing some Gobstoppers candies. I showed this experiment to some of my college chemistry students while they were workin
Inquiry is a fluid concept. There are some truly fabulous activities on Grand Valley State University's Target Inquiry (TI) website (www.gvsu.edu/targetinquiry). Yes, I am biased as I was part of the first TI cohort, but there are several labs now that were written later and they, too, are terrific.
