The UK's Royal Society of Chemistry recently launched a new section - Learn Chemistry - on the RSC website designed to support chemistry teachers and students worldwide.
Learn Chemistry is designed to bring the RSC's huge range of educational resources into one place. It makes them easily accessible with improved searching. To help with navigation, resources have been tagged in terms of their chemistry content and their relevance to global issues and challenges. Resources are also linked to other relevant content on Learn Chemistry to help teachers prepare their lessons.
One of the major goals of this project has been to improve the standard of resources. All too often, teaching materials consist of static, uninteresting worksheets, it has been observed. But as new technologies capture students' attention in every other quarter, it is essential that technology in education moves on as well. Learn Chemistry hosts many modern learning resources including videos, simulations and interactive games.
The RSC seeks to help teachers around the world deliver more dynamic and exciting lessons. An important part of this is connecting teachers with each other, and the wider chemistry community.
Talk Chemistry provides teachers with a platform to talk about important curriculum issues, share news and thoughts on teaching methods, and even propose resources for the RSC to develop. Blog posts on this site highlight resources that teachers may have overlooked, or are particularly relevant to current news and events.
As well as Talk Chemistry, a 'wiki' area has been introduced. Wikis use the same technology as Wikipedia, which allows the community, in this case teachers and students, to collaboratively add content to web pages. Teachers can share their own tutorials, practicals and quizzes. Students from anywhere in the world can collaborate on research projects. The wiki also contains an easy-to-read chemical database, with simplified information fed directly from the RSC's online database, ChemSpider, so students have the latest chemical data on their fingertips.
Through these community and sharing spaces, the RSC expects to host a wealth of user generated content, which will also be easy to find through the Learn Chemistry search engine.
Throughout 2012 Learn Chemistry will continue to grow with new resources being launched every month.
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