The traditional teaching and learning of chemistry has been unchanged for over 100 years. Students sitting in a row, periodic table in hand, listening to a teacher lecture about how to calculate molar mass or work a stoichiometry problem or balance an equation. I've been doing this for 20 years. A few years ago my district went 1:1, now every student in our district now has a Chromebook checked out to them. Pew Research Center has found as of 2013, 78% of teens 12-17 have a cell phone, I would guess that number is higher now. Students now have immediate access to anything that Google can provide them.
On a recent lesson, I had students draw Lewis structures of molecules. As I bounced from student to student checking their structures I notice that quite a few of my 1st period students we drawing Lewis structures different from how I had showed them, the structures were technically correct but kids would not have known this unless taught by another teacher or if they looked them up. What a percentage of my students were doing was just to simply Google: Lewis structure CO2. Kids can now do this with a large % of basic chemistry concepts. I have found online balanced equation tools as well as online stoichiometry tools. Personally I have used Siri to quickly give me the molar mass of a compound when preparing reagents for a lab. I am not planning on abandoning basic chemistry concepts, I just do not plan on spending as much time on concepts that can easily be looked up. I often hear fellow teachers argue that we should not allow kids to use their Chromebook or phone in class, but I don't feel this is a reflection of the real world. A person working in industry will use any or all of the available tools including the internet, and of course, we should be getting kids ready for the real world of work. So what is answer? For me, it is to start asking questions that can not be simply Googled.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorI am Jamie Camp, a chemistry teacher from Atwater, Ca. I teach chemistry and A.P chemistry in Atwater, Ca. I blog about the experiences of a PBL chemistry classroom. Archives
December 2017
CategoriesLinks |