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2002 Fall Newsletter

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Scott Van Bramer, who takes care of organizing and monitoring our discussions onNewsletter articles, shares his expertise on using the Web. Our leadoff article by Scottcombines an overall picture of what can be done using the Web for teaching as wellas some very specific examples and suggestions.
 
List of Papers in this newsletter
 
1. Developing Web Pages for Teaching, Part II- Creating Web Pages-Part II- Introduction
Scott Van Bramer
Department of Chemistry
Widener University
Chester, PA 19013
 
2. Web Courses in Freshman Chemistry
Leon L. Combs , Ph.D.
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Kennesaw State University
Kennesaw, GA 30144
 
3. Teaching Chemistry Students Using Blackboard as a Platform for"e-education"
Thomas G. Chasteen
Department of Chemistry, Sam Houston State University
 
4. Chemistry Laboratory Web Pages:Photographs
Patty Feist
Lab Coordinator, Organic Chemistry Teaching Labs, CU Boulder.
 
5. Finding Images on the WWW
Harry E.Pence
SUNY Oneonta
Oneonta, NY
 
6. PowerBook G4 and Jaguar
Brian Pankuch
Chemistry Department, Union County College
Cranford, NJ 07016
Editor: 

Brian Pankuch
Chemistry Department, Union County College
Cranford, NJ 07016

Newsletter Articles

Abstracts of Papers

Scott Van Bramer
Department of Chemistry, Widener University
Chester, PA 19013

The first article in this series, Developing Web Pages for Teaching, Part I -Introduction, discussed the basics of what a web page can do and what might beuseful. This second article talks about the details of how you actually create a webpage and put it out there for the world to see. There are lots of different ways to dothis, and there are lots more details than I can present here. This is simply a startingpoint to get you moving. It is based upon my experience teaching other faculty how towrite web pages. Many of the details will be different for your computer system, butthere should be enough information here that you can at least talk to the technicalexperts at your school to get upand running. Good luck.

Leon L. Combs , Ph.D.
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Kennesaw State University
Kennesaw, GA 30144

Four web sites were developed for teaching four sections of freshman chemistry: two sites for science majors, and two sites for pre-nursing majors. The web sites are stand-alone sites linking to WebCT for online testing, bulletin boards discussions, email, and posting of grades. This paper briefly describes the web site development and some comparison of scores of students in two sections of the same science majors' course: one was taught totally online and one was taught totally on campus. Comparing test scores on proctored tests in the science majors' courses, the students in the on-campus course made better scores on the chapter testing than the students in the online course, but the students in the online course scored better on the final exam than the students in the on-campus course. However, the standard deviations of the exam scores of the courses only allows for a "no significant difference" conclusion on the proctored test scores. The two-semester American Chemical Society (ACS) standardized exam scores favored the online students.

Thomas G. Chasteen
Department of Chemistry , Sam Houston State University

Tom Chasteen is back with a review of many of the techniques he and others havetried. Be sure to check out his links especially to some of the best animationsavailable for teaching Chemistry.‘

 

…In my experience this is a relatively common manner of adopting teaching tools:we choose the tools that we see can provide a benefit. We try lots, discard lots, andkeep some. I don't use overhead transparencies in my classes but find use forcomputer-based PowerPoint® and QuickTime® displayed via a laptop and aprojector. E-mail has proven to be something almost indispensable in my teaching...ahigh speed streaming video server has yet to prove its worth to me in my course work(and I'm the heaviest user of computer animations and video in my department).I rely heavily on Server-based forums (or discussion groups) in all but my freshmanand graduate courses, but so-called virtual chat rooms or wa place in my courses even though these are part of the Blackboard package. Finally,I use white chalk but find the texture and consistency of color chalk decidedlyunappealing and frankly hard to use, so I don't.

Patty Feist
Lab Coordinator, Organic Chemistry Teaching Labs, CU Boulder.

Patty demonstrates a number of strategies that has me anxious to get back to taking more lab photographs.

"A picture is worth a thousand words . . . " Using a digital camera and a computer,and a few tricks, chemistry instructors can produce and display high-quality, quick-to-load photos on their web sites. This article guides the novice (or, reluctantinstructor?) through camera features, picture-taking, and photo processing for webdisplays.

Harry E.Pence
SUNY Oneonta
Oneonta, NY

Harry has come up with a great article with really useful links, AS usual I didn't even know most of these existed.

The web is an excellent alternative, since many web pages include images. Unfortunately, it can be a discouraging job to find the desired needle in the midst of the two billion pages of the WWW haystack. There are, however, several resources that can make this searching easier and more likely to be successful.

Brian Pankuch
Chemistry Department, Union County College
Cranford, NJ 07016

A number of features strike me when I turn on the PowerBook ( 800 MHz G4 processor with Velocity Engine, 1GB memory) next to my 20 inch monitor connected to the desktop system.. The 15.2 in diagonal PowerBook screen looks to be similar in size to the 20 in monitor. The PowerBook is 5.5 lbs complete with a much smaller footprint.