Adventures in Chemistryland

I will admit to reading ahead in the Challenges. I have kept the challenges for Weeks 3, 4 and 5 in my mind as I taught and planned these last few weeks. I wanted to use the challenges in a meaningful way, where they best fit in my curriculum, rather than putting them in in an artificial way. I found that by keeping them in the back of my mind, ways to use them present themselves all the time. As a result, I have done at least part of all three of these challenges. I am grateful that I found the IWB Challenge and I know that it is improving my use of the Smartboard.

This post will describe how I, and my students, used the Transparency feature. When I first read this challenge, I was less than convinced of its usefulness in my classroom. The examples given didn’t seem to fit chemistry. It wasn’t long, however, before a need arose. I had one of my classes making movies, defining introductory terms such as solid, liquid, gas, etc. One of those terms was “ions”. It was hard to make the abstract idea of ions accessible in a visual medium, so I introduced her to the idea of transparency. We took a picture of a solution, then imported the picture into the Smartboard. She wrote the ions underneath the picture. As she recorded her voice talking about ions, she slowly make the solution transparent, revealing the ions that it contained. It was a great visual effect!

As I was planning this week’s lessons, another idea for using transparency presented itself. I wanted to explain to my beginning students the idea of dimensional analysis. They often have difficulty understanding that the vertical lines mean multiplication and the horizontal line means division. So I wrote out two fractions with parentheses around them. I showed the students my equation, and asked them what parentheses mean (multiplication) and what the line in a fraction meant (division). Then I used transparency to bring to the fore my dimensional analysis problem superimposed on the original equation, so the students could see the analogy between the vertical lines and the parentheses and the horizontal line and the fraction. It seemed to work really well, and I think the students understood the format of dimensional analysis better than in other years.

The other important component to dimensional analysis is that the top and the bottom of each step must equal one. I plan to make a “1″ and keep superimposing it on each dimensional analysis problem, so that the students remember that idea. I can use transparency to make the “1″ appear and disappear at will. And to think I thought the transparency effect would not be useful to me!