Chemsheets and chemistry diagrams

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Tony Tooth, chemistry teacher at The King's School in Ely, looks at some websites that may be of interest to chemistry teachers. In this issue: Chemsheets revisited, a fresh look at chemistry diagrams, and three dimensional structures in a spin

Chemsheets - Index

Chemsheets

Richard Grime of Ripon Grammar School has updated his excellent resource to include material for the new AQA AS chemistry syllabus. The layout of the site has also changed and is more user-friendly with documents available as either Word files or in pdf format.

The worksheets include many exercises useful for homework or revision together with summary notes and some practical exercises. Do remember, however, to do your own risk assessments before doing any of the practicals. Most of the topics also include at least one PowerPoint presentation. The module two material includes an excellent calorimetry PowerPoint that introduces the concept of specific heat capacity clearly and gives a good range of sample calculations. The PowerPoint introduction to equilibria makes good use of graphics and images, though watch out for the clock faces in place of equilibrium arrows if you haven't got ChemFont installed.

Chemistry diagrams

This site has seen a few changes since my last review in November 2007 not least because of several contributions from Mike Thompson of Winchester College. Maintained by Chris Evans of Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School Blackburn, the site features a wide variety of useful images and animations that can be incorporated into documents and presentations. Even something as relatively simple as the many new equations in the 'Organic preparations' section can save you time when producing a worksheet. I particularly like the new animation to explain the origin of the Lyman and Balmer series in the hydrogen emission spectrum. The 'Miscellaneous' section is well worth a browse whatever level you are teaching at because there are 159 items in this section alone. These range from simple and assembled apparatus diagrams, through plots, including titration curves with indicators, to a water cycle and a molecular wordsearch with questions (and answers).

Three dimensional structures

Produced by Chas McCaw of Winchester College, this site consists of over 20 Jmol images of three dimensional structures. Although mainly of interest to teachers of A-level and Pre-U courses, some of the simpler images such as diamond, graphite, ice and buckminster-fullerene will have a wider appeal. With Java enabled on your computer you can rotate and zoom the images to give a much better impression of the structures than is possible with images from textbooks and worksheets.