(Updated 7/8/22)
I’ve just recently decided that writing things on the board is both boring and causes me to miss important topics. As a result, I’ve started using PowerPoint presentations with my classes.
Now, for those of you who don’t use these presentations, I treat them as baselines for the material I actually teach. I don’t just read the stuff from these slides, but use them as a starting point for my presentations. I find that, even with these PowerPoint presentations, I tend to spend a lot of time at the board answering questions and expanding on the material. I like doing this because it allows me the best of both worlds: Uniform material for each class, but individualized help for the specific questions of each student.
Please treat these PowerPoint presentations as guidelines and not as resources you can use off the shelf. They all reflect my personal method of teaching, so you should make whatever changes are needed to reflect your own style. In any case, I hope you find these useful!
- An introduction to acids and bases. Covers material through pH, but doesn’t go as far as discussing titrations.
- A visit to the world of covalent compounds, and how their molecular structure leads to their observed properties.
- How to draw Lewis structures. Doesn’t deal with expanded octet stuff, though.
- What’s an equation? How do you balance them? That kind of stuff.
- My talk on the first day of class. Obviously, you’ll have to do some serious work to get this relevant for your own classes.
- A basic introduction to gases, including the best that Boyle, Charles, Gay-Lussac, Combined, and Ideal have to offer.
- Hydrates, anhydrates, dehydration, hydration – you know, the greatest hits of hydrates.
- The magical tale of how the behavior of gas molecules affects the overall properties of gases. I like this one because you can make it as complicated or simple as you want to.
- As the first page states, this is a “guide to the things you’ll soon be breaking.”
- Just a quick presentation about the Law of Conservation of Mass. Should go nicely with a lab where you get your students to devise it on their own.
- A focus on the mole. By the way, I’ve stopped having students do calculations from particles to moles because it’s not something that they’ll ever run into in the real world.
- Part 1 of everybody’s favorite electronegativity-related topic.
- More wild times with polarity.
- Whether you love chemical, physical, intrinsic, or extrinsic properties, here’s a PowerPoint to show you how to make the magic happen!
- I’ve made what might be a controversial decision: I’ve decided to cut the part about doing calculations with significant figures. There are two reasons for this: 1) It’s nowhere near as important as discussing the whole idea of what a significant figure is, and 2) Nobody remembers it anyway.
- You’ve got to admit: It’s a good method!
Pretty much you’d expect. Everything from the difference between a solution, a colloid, and a suspension through concentration and colligative properties.
- The basics of stoichiometry and how it works.
- An introduction to the six types of reaction, as well as a description of how you can tell whether single displacement or double displacement reactions will actually occur. This PowerPoint pairs well with a discussion of how to synthesize various ionic compounds (and related labs).
- A voyage through the world of the metric system/SI units (I treat them as being the same thing, even though they’re not for simplicity’s sake, so please, no emails), how to convert between SI and Imperial units, and how to use metric prefixes as needed.
The Cavalcade o' Teaching 