Adventures in Chemistryland

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.