Adventures in Chemistryland

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.