Teaching Resources

Date: 2012.09.01

Posted by Tsechpenakis Sakis (Greece)

Message: Ι found this web site, superb!!! This portal is a “super tool” for the chemistry teacher of a junior high school. Of course some of the subjects presented, are not included in the Greek ministry of education, syllabus for junior high school chemistry, but the main skeleton remains the same.
In Greece, in order to organize our lesson, we are given some general directives for teaching the subjects, describing the necessary laboratory exercises throughout the year (4-6 per year) and the number of lessons we have to spend on each subject. I should point out that the Chemistry lesson in the Greek Junior High School Curriculum, is only scheduled only for one hour per week and only for the last two school years! This means that during the entire Junior High School, a Greek student, will attend, in the best scenario, about forty six 45minute lessons of chemistry. So, in such a limited time-schedule, a Greek Chemistry teacher, would make only a partial use of such a “rich” in resources, web site.
Surfing through this portal, made me admire, the power tools, our chemistry colleagues in Ireland, are equipped with! It literally organizes the daily courses of Chemistry, in a way that the teacher doesn’t have to improvise all the time to keep his pupils alert!! He is given a variety of resources and ways to approach a certain subject with just a click of the mouse! It depends on him to choose the resource he finds suitable for each class and subject.
The portal is organized in three greater sections:
a) Classification of substances
b) Air – oxygen – Carbon Dioxide- Water
c) Atomic Structure- Reactions- Compounds
Each section contains 5 to 10 subjects. Each subject, has the goals for the students already presented. The teacher and the students find themselves with 6 distinct parts for each subject:
• Introduction (some Word documents are presented here describing what the pupils are going to encounter)
• Resources (teacher support material- word documents plus web-links with supportive information for the teacher, ready, plug and play! Powerpoints for each subject, and links to fantastic interactive on line experiments through the skoool.co.uk web site)
• Investigation (the student informative documents for the laboratory work, for each subject)- In some subjects more than one exercises is proposed!
• Background (Some information for the substances used are presented)
• Assessment (the students are redirected to on line self assessment tests, in order to evaluate their knowledge on each subject)
• Web links, with even more things to be involved with!!
Furthermore this site provides the teacher with a link, for the MSDS (Material Safety Data Sheets) documents for all the substances to be used. This is of paramount importance for the safety of the children in the Lab. No matter how experienced the Chemist actually is, a pre-printed MSDS, is always a good and importantly, quick reference, to assess and avoid any possible danger!
To make a long story short, this portal enabled me to find out, how the syllabus of Chemistry could be organized by the authorities, in order to untie the hands of the Chemistry teacher, especially in a tight time schedule! With the help of such web sites, organized to fit each country’s Science syllabus, chemistry and the other sciences could evolve to become students’ favorite lessons in high school! Which, after all is the aim, for us all!