Videos, notes and quizzes

0316EiCReviewBoomer630m

Complete chemistry tutor
Andrew Wilkins
Boomer Chemistry
2015 | Print and web | £ varies
www.boomerchemistry.com

One of the challenges of flipping your lab can be finding the perfect material to give your pupils. If you look on YouTube you’ll find a raft of videos you can refer your students to. However, finding high quality, specification-specific resources is very time consuming. The Complete chemistry tutor from Boomer Chemistry certainly provides this for the AS course (and it looks like the A2 course will be appearing soon, too). It’s also rather good if you’re looking to point students at revision resources.

The course is broken down into specification-linked chapters. Every chapter includes two to eight videos, each containing a lot of information. The videos are simple but nicely produced and generally work well even if you don’t have a device with sound. However, I found the practical chapter a little weak, with only one experiment outlined so far.

A set of notes is provided with each video. Some of my pupils enjoyed writing on these alongside the videos, and while I didn’t use them in the classroom, I could have done so easily. It is a shame the notes are only supplied as pdf files as this means you can’t customise them.

I particularly like the short quizzes incorporated in each chapter. They test the knowledge gained, provide some simple feedback and are also supported by videos. Each chapter finishes with exam questions, accompanied by mark schemes and video explanations of how you should answer in an exam.

Although the quality of the content is excellent, it is a shame the platform used is limiting and the site design feels dated. Currently made mainly using Adobe Flash on an unresponsive website, it was difficult to use through the school network and on mobile devices. I thought this was unfortunate as the price seems expensive for something that can’t be accessed everywhere. But this was the only big downside I could find to a resource that provides exceptional content. I’ll certainly be keen to use the A2 resource when it’s ready.

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