In these days, computers and networks are used in the university classes as if they had been used for decades. The blackboard has been substituted by a large screen for projecting images from our liquid crystalline displayed (LCD) projectors. Many textbooks or lecture notes are available electronically on the Internet instead of purchasing from bookstores or print services. Most announcements to students are delivered not on the traditional bulletin boards but on the www-based portal systems.

I have been teaching organic chemistry at Soka University for twenty years as a one-year sixty-hour course. Facing the changes depicted above, I have tried to introduce a new technology for assisting and improving the class teaching and learning. This article describes my experiences in this aspect for more than ten years.

As a high school educator, one of the biggest priorities (after covering the required standards tested on state assessments) is finding a way to engage students and "meet them where they are." In a world of fast-paced and flashy media, sometimes school classrooms can feel like a time warp for students. While working to find a way to create a rigorous Pre-AP Chemistry course, I have determined that utilizing some new technologies has been successful without sacrificing course content. Over the past few years, I have incorporated Facebook, Google Calendar, and cell phones into my curriculum with favorable results.

One reason chemistry poses a challenge to both learners and teachers is that, for robust conceptual understanding, students must understand how and why molecular level structure affects reactivity and properties. Much has been written on the difficulties students have in translating between a symbolic, molecular, and macroscopic understanding of chemistry (1, 2) and most modern texts go to great lengths to provide multiple representations to students.1 Lewis structures are probably the most important of the symbolic representations that students encounter. Students must master not only what the representations mean, but also how and why they are constructed, and what they are used (and useful) for. Unfortunately, many students have great difficulty both drawing and using Lewis structures. For example in our work we have seen that the majority of students (even in an organic chemistry course) do not appear to use structures to predict properties in a meaningful way (3). Many students (and perhaps some instructors) confuse the rules for drawing structures with the concepts that underlie bonding, resulting in students who believe that bonds form because atoms "want" or "need" an octet (4, 5). Indeed the idea that Lewis structures are symbolic representations may well be lost on many students (for example: if asked what the bond angle is in methane, when presented with a typical Lewis structure, many students will answer 90 ).

The BestChoice web site (bestchoice.net.nz) was born in 2002 out of a desire to offer additional learning support to students in large first-year university courses. The aim was to create web-based activities that modeled a one-on-one interchange with an experienced teacher. Thus it was intended that content be developed systematically, using both information and question pages, and that users receive instructive feedback in response to their answers.