8th Irish Variety in Chemistry Teaching Meeting

DIT played host to the 8th Irish Variety in Chemistry Teaching meeting, modelled on the very successful UK Variety in Chemistry Education (ViCE) meeting on Thursday May 10th. There was a workshop in the morning covering two aspects of technology in chemistry teaching; using wikis, by Claire McDonnell, who demonstrated how to set up, edit and modify a wiki, along with highlighting the advantages of a wiki for monitoring group work – the ability to be able to track who did what and when. Claire identified this as the most useful aspect of wikis from her perspective in teaching. My…

LiveScribe Pen Review: Don’t

Update: See comments below I recently bought a Livescribe pen with the aim of creating “Pencasts” – videos of pen writings aimed at online tutorials for demonstrating calculations, annotating diagrams etc – effectively screencasts on the fly. Unfortunately, someone who makes decisions in Livescribe has decreed that the pencast (the video and audio) output will be a proprietary format. After recording pencast, they can be exported to a PDF (final visual only), or uploaded to a space on the Livescribe website. I wanted to be able to export the pencast raw file to Camtasia to do a bit of post-production,…

Importing Camcorder into Camtasia Studio

I love my Sony camcorder, but unfortunately the video output it produces is in MPEG-2 format. This will play in something like Windows media player, but you can’t import it into Camtasia Studio. This video shows the workflow I go through to convert imported videos using Any Video Converter, and the subsequent sound/picture editing that might be considered depending on your scenario.

Podcasting and screencasting for supporting lectures

Prompted by my visit to Edinburgh next week to the “More Effective Lectures” workshop, I have compiled several blog posts and bits and pieces of other writing into a Resource Pack that I hope might be useful to other practitioners entitled: “Podcasting and screencasting for supporting lectures“. The resource is a PDF file and is available at this link: Podcasting and Screencasting for Supporting Lectures or click on the image below. The resource covers: Introduction to the use of podcasts/screencasts in education Overview of the design of e-resources Tips for preparing podcasts and screencasts Tools of the trade: Audacity, Camtasia and…

Iodine Clock – Pre-Lab Activity

This is an Articulate interaction which incorporates video demonstrations the various aspects of the iodine clock experiment and then has a quiz towards the end. This could be used as a pre-lab activity, where students could print out their response to the quiz and bring it to the lab, or alternatively link the quiz to the VLE by SCORM. Click on the image to access the resource: Funding from NDLR and DIT gratefully acknowledged.

Demonstration of the iodine clock experiment

This experiment demonstrates the iodine clock reaction between iodide and persulfate ions, using thiosulfate as the ‘clock’. After some introduction details, three experiments are performed: studying the effect of concentration to determine the orders of reactants (3:01), studying the effect of temperature to determine the activation energy (7:47) and studying the effect of solvent polarity (9:42). Funding from NDLR and DIT gratefully acknowledged.