More free stuff! - TedEd, Khan Academy, MIT, and PheT - Activity 12

Last year, I was really envious of one of my colleagues (OK, I can often be envious!) who flipped his class.  What a change in the classroom!  He often lectured before and the students took notes.  Now when I go by his class, students are always up and about doing a variety of tasks and not all the same ones.  Some will be on computers, some working on a lab and some discussing.  It is so much fun to see the transformation.  He had spent years perfecting his PowerPoints for his lectures, but now he taped his lecture with the PowerPoints and put them online.  Homework is watching the lectures and class time is everything else.  I wondered how I could do something similar, but I did not lecture as much and I have few PowerPoints that I could easily narrate and put online.  I would have to start from scratch - too much time! Here is where I might be able to use sites like TedEd,  Khan Academy, and MIT.

TedEd

I searched TedEd and they have limited chemistry resources currently.  I found one on Mendeleev that I might use, but not for flipping, more for just added info.The video is below by TedEd.

Khan Academy

Then I went to Khan Academy, and the problem is finding a video that you like the entire content or I should say that you like how they present the material.  I tried one on periodic table trends and it gave an oversimplified view of why alkali metals have low ionization energies.  They state that it is because if they lose an electron then they can become like a noble gas.  This fails to include the real reason - that due to the increased shielding (lower effective nuclear charge) and distance from the nucleus that the energy needed to remove the valence electron is small. (I know -Blah, Blah, Blah for the non-chemists).  Finding the right video, and the right content became a little bit more difficult.  I then tried another video from Khan and the lecturer kept calling the chloride ion, chlorine.  It is these errors that I am having difficulty with.  One way I have used a video in the past is to add disclaimers for students when viewing if the disclaimer is small.

MIT

The MIT open courseware is quite amazing.  The site has full classes online with lectures, notes, exams and everything.  It also has a section on chemistry demonstrations.  I put one of them below, by MITopencourseware.  I usually prefer to do the demo myself, but I may have the students go watch the detailed explanation of the demo from the videos after we do them in class.  I may also have my students watch all or part of some of the 1 hour lectures provided.

PheT

This site has great animations.  I really like to add these so that students can see what is happening on a molecular or atomic level.  This one shows what happens to gas molecules if you heat them in a closed container.

Me?

After looking at so many sites, I was still envious of my colleague.  I think if I want it (the lesson) to be like I want it -it would be great if I could at least do a few of my own videos.  I would like to learn more about how to do that too.