Teacher
Websites
Created by Erik Heinemann
A high school chemistry
teacher
Introduction:
I teach high
school chemistry and often will turn to the Web for activities and things I can
do with the students. There is a load of
sites out there that can be useful for teachers, but some of the most useful
sites are those created BY teachers for their own classes. Here are two that I have found for chemistry
classes that I find useful.
Periodic table activity – This site is an activity module that
students are to follow with goals and outcomes clearly marked. The activity was created by Linda Burris for
an 11 grade chemistry class at
Recommendations:
·
The
site is very well organized provides information on many aspects of the
assignment; however the rubric could be organized in a better way. It reads now that 25% of the assignment is
one thing while 25% is another, but gives little on the specifics as most
rubrics do.
·
Links
for parents, or to the teachers homepage would be useful. The activity is wonderfully done, but
provides in the end only a link to the high school webpage. If the teacher has a homepage or index for
other activities then links for these would have been good to include.
·
Examples
of either poor projects or exemplary projects would be useful for the
students. If links for projects
submitted in the past were shown so that students had some idea of what they
are expected to do would be helpful.
(Though as a teacher, I know that some students will try to copy or
mimic the examples closely and so this is not always the best option.)
Commendations:
·
The
organization of the site almost perfect.
There is an introduction, an assignment, a procedure, an explanation of
the evaluation and a quick conclusion.
·
In
addition it provides interactive links for the Periodic Table and links to
provide information that helps along the way.
·
It also
provides a link to the school and some general information on the class and the
standards that are being met with the assignment.
NHS Online Chemistry – The index provided here is from an
online class/school. The particular site
chosen here is an index with chemistry activities that students can do online.
Overall, the activities here are accessible to anyone with Internet access. This means that they are available for
teachers and students to use. However,
most of the information that could be accessed from can be done only with the
permission of the teacher that organized it.
This is not a bad thing, but it does limit its usefulness for other
teachers unless they are creative enough to incorporate the activities in
specific ways.
Recommendations:
·
Many
of the activities have problems that the students can try and check, but there
is not much in the way of information for the students as to how they can solve
the problems. It seems the teacher is
dependent on class notes or other things.
By providing information the students could use some of these activities
as an exploration type activity.
·
Breaking
the activities up into the specific units might be helpful for high school
students to know when they should try each of the practice problem sections.
·
Assessments. If the teacher were to attach assessments to
these activities they could be used for mini quiz or drill for a quick game at
the start of class.
Commendations:
·
The
activities provided give the students opportunity to practice certain problems
with the opportunity to check their answers and receive some explanations as
some of the activities have a “show answer” or “solution” option.
·
The
“view data” option that is found on many of the activities is a great and quick
reference table for many different chemical properties that students would
explore through the duration of the course.
·
The
teacher seems to have organized things very well. There is a log in option (which I do not have
access to) that seems to be set up for the students and parents to communicate
with the teacher.
Summary:
There are many teacher created sites on the Web. Here are just two quick examples that I have
located for chemistry classes and chemistry activities since that is what I
teach. To find sites for the class or
subject you teach you can use some of the big search engines but might have to
be creative in the keywords you use.
These sites were found after several other searches have failed to
produce sites that I could use. For
these I used the keywords “teacher created websites” and some other variations
that included “teacher created chemistry websites” .