Adventures in Chemistryland

I found this challenge to be very difficult for me. It was about using the interactive whiteboard as an instrument of reflection and a way for students to create/add to an e-portfolio. These are areas in which I struggle. I know I should have my students reflect on their learning, and I should have them create e-portfolios, but I never know quite how to do it. I thought long and hard before I decided how I could use this challenge to help me achieve those goals.

I finally decided to use the results of Challenge 5 for this assignment. I had the students evaluate the self-correcting quizzes on the atom that they had already made. My idea was that they could reflect on what they knew about the atom at that moment in time, and also what they knew about making the self-correcting quizzes. I had each student take everyone else’s quiz, so I also thought they might have found new ideas on other people’s quizzes that would help them improve their own. In addition, since some time had passed since they made the quizzes, they could evaluate what they had learned since they made the quizzes, and see the progress of their learning.

The students’ evaluations ran the gamut from superficial to detailed, and I think, next time I do this, I will have to give them a specific rubric for evaluating their work. However, I do think it was a good idea, and one I will continue to use. Chemistry is a challenging subject, and the students often get discouraged. I think having them periodically stop and think about what they know and how far they’ve come will keep them from feeling they will “never get it” and giving up. All of these assignments can build into a portfolio, showing that growing knowledge.  

As discussed on the Whiteboard Challenge website, there is no direct equivalent of containers in SMARTBoard, however, there seemed to me to be many ways to accomplish the same thing. I took this challenge to be about creating lessons where the students could find the correct answers through interaction with the board, without the need for the teacher to be there.

My first thought was to use the whiteboard as a center. I created a measurement lab that had stations. At each station the students had to measure an object or read the amount of liquid in a piece of glassware, etc, and one station was the SMARTBoard. I used the Vortex sort from the Lessons and Activity toolkit and had the students decide which of two metric prefixes was bigger than the other. This was self-correcting, because, if the student chose wrong, the vortex “spit out” the wrong answer. If the student was right, the prefix was “swallowed up” by the vortex.

For the second part of this challenge, I assigned the students to make their own self-correcting quizzes, on the atom. I showed them several ways to allow students to interact with the SMARTBoard software to determine the correct answer to a question, then let the students run with the idea. Due to some issues downloading the software onto the student computers, some of them used PowerPoint to do similar ideas. All of the students’ quizzes can be found here. The students had some great ideas. They used multiple choice questions, with links to “correct” and “incorrect” pages; they used color to reveal the correct answer, they used “send-to-back” and “bring-to-front” to distinguish the correct answer – check these quizzes out. The students were very excited about them, and enjoyed taking each other’s quizzes. I even had a comment from a parent that she was impressed with what her daughter had made.  I have put them online, so the students can practice with them as they prepare for an upcoming test.

All in all, this was a successful challenge. I really like the idea of self-correcting quizzes, and I think it’s an idea I will revisit often.

I tried this challenge in two different ways. The first time was as part of an assessment. I was teaching stoichiometry to my chemistry class. In prior years, I had asked the students to describe concepts such as limiting reagent, excess reagent and theoretical yield using an analogy. This year, with the Voicethread idea, I decided to make a movie with Smartboard of a girl making a necklace with beads. I had the students comment on the Voicethread as a take-home portion of the test. This worked well, because the students had a more visual way of understanding the question. The disadvantage was that some of the students had technical difficulties getting on the site. Also, since this was a take-home question, there was a possibility of cheating, though I do not believe this happened.

The second time I tried this was with Advanced Placement chemistry. The topic here was the equilibrium of salts, and whether a salt was acidic, basic or neutral. Again, I used the SmartBoard to make a little movie of salts, which I posted to Voicethread. This time, I made several identities on the Voicethread, and assigned each group of students to one of the identities. I did this so that students would not have to sign up for their own accounts on Voicethread, and to help with security. In class, I gave each group a salt, and told them to decide how to determine the pH. They were to record their procedure in the Voicethread (without getting into the details of the math). Then they would calculate the pH of a 0.1 M solution of their salt, make the solution and then check their math by measuring the pH.

For the most part, this worked very well. The students really benefitted from having to articulate their procedure before they “dove in” to the math. Most of them solved the problem correctly. One group that obtained a very different pH once they made their solution was able to find their mistake very quickly because they had written out their Voicethread. I was able to embed the Voicethread in my website (http://faculty.sha-excelsior.org/christophy/APCoursePage.htm) so the students can review both the movie and their solving procedures.

There were a couple of problems. Again, I had technical difficulties. Some of the students were not able to bring up the site on their computers. But because I had made everyone an identity on my account, I just had them go one at a time up to my computer and record from there. Another issue came when we ran out of recording space. I guess that, if I do this again, I will have to pay to have a larger account.

The one aspect of this that I would like to work on would be interactivity. I would like the students to listen and respond to other’s comments – to make this a real dialog. I think this would be most useful in a collaborative environment. It is kind of silly to have all of us in the same classroom commenting on-line when we can just talk in class. However, if we were collaborating with another AP class somewhere else, we could use this as a way of enhancing the understanding of both classes. 

I just learned about this tool not that long ago, and this was my first chance to try it. I used it to help teach about ionic compounds. I gave my students several chemical equations, and then I wrote charge possibilities at the top of the page, and used the infinite cloner on the charges. I then had my students drag the charges to the right place in each equation. I had each student download the file to their own computers and do it for homework, then we went over it together on the Board. I had the students make an “infinite clone” for themselves, so they would know how to use the tool. When I have the students make review quizzes for each other on the Smartboard software, they will know about this tool.

I found it very useful, and I wished I had known about it before. I had made a similar lesson last year, where I had my students drag down electrons for electron configuration practice. I just copied and pasted the electrons and lay them on top of each other. After a while, it looked pretty messy, and I was still worried about running out of electrons. The infinite cloner takes care of both problems. This a definitely a good tool to know about!