On Wednesday, I traveled to Richmond, VA to participate in SERMACS2011, the southeastern regional meeting of the American Chemical Society. This was a really great opportunity for me to share some ideas about social media and how I use applications like Moodle, Twitter and Google Plus to teach chemistry to my students at Wayne Community College.
The abstract for my talk is given below:
Today’s students arrive in our chemistry classrooms with their smart phones, their laptops, tablets or netbooks. Ear buds are often attached to iPods or some other MP3-playing device that we have to ask them to remove when they enter our classrooms. Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube often compete for their attention. As chemistry faculty, we are asked to maintain faculty Webpages and often utilize course management systems like Blackboard or Moodle in our teaching.
Chemistry faculty often have been slow to adopt and utilize social media like Twitter and Facebook in their teaching. But those of us who have embraced new social media trends have found that it allows us to better connect with our students and provides our students with a vast array of ways to learn more about chemistry and its place in our society.
Over the last three years, I have utilized technology and social media to improve my teaching of chemistry at the community college level. I can do the same thing for you. Join me in this presentation as I share some of the tips that worked best for me in this new social media-driven world.
I had a great time at the SERMACS2011 conference. The social media presenters had a great lunch at the Tobacco Company hosted by Ken Podraza of Altria who helped to put together the Social Media in Science section.
The presenters were all great. I got to see my first prezi type presentation and I got to meet in person @pidgirl Jennifer Maclachlan who made a couple of presentations on using Facebook and Twitter with her business.
Thursday was a throwback to my graduate school days at Duke University, where I worked for C. William Anderson, who is now at Hampton Sydney College in Virginia in the area of electrochemistry – more specifically the technique of cyclic voltammetry.
So it was great for me to see how much has happened in this area of electrochemistry since I was in graduate school. An unexpected treat was that Royce Murray of UNC-Chapel Hill was speaking on his group’s latest research. For those that do not know, Royce Murray is one of the “Gods” of electrochemistry and it was nice for us to reconnect and speed a few minutes together. He was even gracious enough to pose for a picture with me that I will be able to show my students.
Friday came quickly and after some free “Starbucks” coffee I attended several sessions of the chemical education I session. Most of the sessions were interesting, but one that I really enjoyed was by Melissa Rhoten, a chemistry professor a Longwood University who talked about their SOLstice: Summer of Learning – Science Teachers Investing the Cheasapeake Environment program for service and pre-service K-8 teachers. The goal of this program is to help new teachers learn more about science while studying the impact of the Cheasapeake Bay on the state of Virginia.
This program reminds me of “Earthview” (2000-2003), a joint summer research program for earth science teachers sponsored by NC State and East Carolina University. It was a great three summers, and it introduced me to my good friend John Blake who is a major reason why I was a presenter at SERMACS2011 this week. Hopefully SOLstice will be just as inspiring for this group of teachers at Longwood.
Later, my wife and I decided to checkout St John’s Episcopal Church, where Patrick Henry gave his “Give me Liberty or Give me Death” speech was delivered on 23 March 1775 inside the church. When we were done, because we were both hungry we started looking for a place to eat lunch in the “Tobacco Row” section of Richmond. Thanks to a gentleman who was blowing leaves on the street we discovered Millie’s Dinner. The soup and our sandwiches were wonderful.
It was a wonderful experience and I want to thank the science department at Wayne Community College for funding my trip and allowing me the opportunity to go. At the same time, I am happy to be home where labs and quizzes await me to grade. It never ends.
ATG
