For the past four years, I have required my inorganic students to write short 3-page formal lab reports in the form of communication to the Journal of the American Chemical Society.  This exercise has relieved some of the stress on my students who are writing reports of other science classes and simplified my grading.  Using Jeffrey Kovac's Writing Across the Chemistry Curriculum: An Instructor's Handbook as a starting point, I have developed a rubric to provide qualitative feedback to the stu

This project was initiated as a way to enhance the descriptive inorganic chemistry unit presented in our General Chemistry II curriculum.  As the time available in the term prohibited the amount of lecture time needed to cover this vast array of material, the idea of a research project allowed for students to investigate an inorganic chemistry topic of keen interest to them over the course of the semester.  A previous term's attempt using a research paper project was quite unpopular, so the idea of a multimedia presentation was devised as an alternative to achieve similar learning goals.  S

This in-class exercise prepares students for the homework Literature Searching: Bibliography Assignment. It allows them to practice the skills needed for that assignment while in class.

To allow students to become familiar with the structure of chemical literature and provide them with an understanding of several types of basic handbooks.

This assignment will orient new students to searching and finding chemical literature and effectively citing said literature.  The library session focuses on the semantics of the ACS style, overviews appropriate indexing/searching tools, and has students search and find two citations for a future lab assignment for their chemistry class.  

Delicious is a social bookmarking tool that retains bookmarks on the web.  Users can access their bookmarks from any computer, and Delicious allows for the tagging of bookmarks with relevant descriptors for follow up, searching, and collaborative work.