Slideshare

This website lets you share your presentations with the world, by uploading PowerPoint, OpenOffice or PDF presentations. You can choose to share your material either publicly or privately, with colleagues or on intranets or private Internet sites. Without registering you can browse, search by topics and view publicly shared resources. By registering for free you can download any of the publicly shared material.  

This particular link is to the 'SlideSpace' of the 2008-09 Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) teacher fellow Anthony Hardwicke. This contains 21 presentations and PDF documents to support Today in chemistry, a 365-page chemistry calendar which highlights anniversaries in chemistry. There is also a series of presentations on KS3 mini-practicals designed so that simple instructions for each practical, accompanied by graphics, appear step by step with a click of the mouse. Practicals in the series include burning magnesium, the reaction between calcium and water, endothermic and exothermic reactions, displacement reactions and neutralisation.  

A quick search through the whole site didn't reveal many other areas of interest to chemists. but, if more of us started to use it, the site could become a useful resource for disseminating teaching materials. 

Science Photo Library

Science Photo Library offer an amazing collection of images with nearly 10,000 in the chemistry section ranging from people, through reactions, to tunnelling electron microscope images. You can buy images as prints but the schools' subscription, which costs £149 a year (or £249 if you want access to high-resolution images) allows all images to be downloaded and used through a school intranet by students and staff in documents, PowerPoints, coursework etc. Promotional use, such as in a prospectus, is however excluded from the license. This site is well worth a browse if you want to enhance your teaching materials. 

SATIS revisited

To support the teaching of the 'how science works' section of the GCSE specifications, the Association for Science Education (ASE) is updating its Science and technology in society  (SATIS) material originally produced in the 1980s. A summary page for each SATIS unit gives information on the topic, including the number and type of activities within the unit, and a list of downloadable files. Each unit also provides 'Guidance for teachers' with information on how to use the unit and how to work through the individual activities. The 'Web links' page takes you to further resources that support the activities in the unit and provide additional information on the topic.