Safety in science laboratories, especially chemistry laboratories, should always be a foremost concern. There is always more that can be done to assure that students in science laboratories, both research and teaching, can carry out experiments without accident. This week Chemical & Engineering News, the magazine that goes to all members of the American Chemical […]

How many of you have had students use the ideas of others inappropriately? Plagiarism has become easier on the Web and many people are not aware of what proper behavior is. A nice collection of online tools for detecting plagiarism is available at http://www.guidetoonlineschools.com/online-teaching/plagiarism#q. These will be useful if you have made clear to students […]

Do any of you readers have experience with whiteboards? If so, I would be interested in your comments on this article from the Washington Post.
http://bit.ly/9kSHRQ

Chemical & Engineering News, the magazine that goes to all members of the American Chemical Society, has devoted a special issue to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The articles are mostly available to anyone, but a few of them are only available to ACS members. They provide important scientific background for […]

. As recently as a few years ago it was popular to regard nanoscience and nanotechnology as fads that would pass. I recall, for example, being chided by some for using the term “nanoscale” in a first-year college chemistry textbook. But this is one fad that is not passing–at least as measured by the rapidly […]

Is the only way children will be able to communicate with their parents going to be through Facebook or Twitter?
I was struck by an item in the New York Times (Thursday, June 10, p. D1; http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/garden/10childtech.html?scp=2&sq=Scelfo%20&st=cse) that described a toddler who, after numerous attempts to get his mother to respond to a question, tried to […]

The Camille & Henry Dreyfus Foundation has established the Jean Dreyfus Boissevain Lectureship, which  provides an $18,500 grant for a primarily undergraduate institution to bring in a leading researcher to give a series of lectures in the chemical sciences. In addition to presenting lectures, the Jean Dreyfus Boissevain Lecturer is expected to […]

In the past the ChemEd DL blog contained mainly items from the Journal of Chemical Education. These included editorials that I wrote when I was editor of the JCE and columns written by Erica Jacobsen and Laura Slocum, the high school editors. Other items were reprinted from the JCE when we thought they would be […]

By Dan Toomey, Edgewood Middle School, Madison, Wisconsin
I have used “A Kool Reaction from the Fine Print” JCE Classroom Activity with my 8th grade students as guided-inquiry method in order to introduce atoms. (This activity is the one that was done in the Chemistry Comes Alive! Part 4 NSDL/NSTA Web Seminar on October 15.) We […]

What can you and your students learn from videos showing reactions of the elements? A lot! The link below is to an article that describes what we learned from videos that show elements reacting with air, water, acids, and base and how what the video showed compared with textbook descriptions. Tied to this year’s National […]