Since 2004, Jmol has become the de facto molecular viewer for Web pages, supporting chemical education, chemical research, cheminformatics, and molecular biology. One result of recent efforts to enhance the capabilities of the Jmol applet is the CheMagic O=CHem Virtual Molecular Model Kit: http://www.chemagic.com/vmk. The VMK is a multi-functional molecular model kit capable of doing everything that can be done with traditional “ball and stick” models, and much, much more. Along with a brief history of its development and a brief look behind the scenes, this paper will describe the major features of the VMK and illustrate various ways it may be used as a pedagogical tool.

This paper aims to highlight the significant activities organized and facilitated by the Committee on Chemistry Education (CCE) of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) to celebrate the International Year of Chemistry (IYC) many of which are carried out in partnership with others within and outside of IUPAC. Several global and local activities special to IYC 2011 has been organized around world. At the international level, the Global Water Experiment (GWE), jointly organized by IUPAC and UNESCO, became a central flagship unifying activity for IYC 2011 with the hope of reaching hundreds of thousands of young people around the world with hands-on experiments related to the substance water, which is vital to all forms of life on earth. The second activity, carried out in partnership with RSC, ACS, and UNESCO is focused on visualizing and understanding the science of climate change. The project is in the final stages of producing a set of peer-reviewed, interactive, web-based materials to help learners visualize and understand the underlying science of climate change. The third activity was a global stamp competition which was open to all students around the world in 3 age categories (12-14, 15-18 and undergraduates from all subjects (not only chemistry!). Finally another international activity was focused on collecting the ideas for IYC 2011 all over the world with the goal of developing toolkits for national chemistry days and weeks during IYC 2011 to raise awareness of the importance of chemistry as the central science by highlighting the applications of chemistry in daily life. In addition to these international activities several local activities were organized to celebrate IYC 2011 around world. This paper will focuses on describing these activities to the chemistry community.

The Dynamic Laboratory Manual (DLM) is an interactive, web-based laboratory manual, which has been developed by Bristol ChemLabS staff in the School of Chemistry at the University of Bristol in association with a Bristol-based e-learning company, Learning Science Ltd. It forms the centre piece of the Bristol ChemLabS (http://www.chemlabs.bris.ac.uk/) student experience of practical chemistry and has transformed teaching and student learning in a laboratory environment. This paper provides an overview of how the new laboratory experience evolved and why the DLM was developed as well as the staff-student interface supporting software to record marks and absences. The expansion of this educational approach to postgraduate level chemistry and to other disciplines is noted.