To handle the approximately 1000 submissions that we receive each year, edit text and graphics, lay out pages, prepare pages for printing, get everything online, and maintain the online material as well as archiving all content, we have an excellent, paid staff of 15 editors and a publications coordinator. The eight-member Board of Publication provides input and guidance. There are nearly 60 volunteer editors of 41 print and 16 online feature columns who lend their expertise and hard work to improving the Journal’s content, and there are thousands of reviewers who evaluate submitted manuscripts, software, Web-based materials, video, and other content. (Our annual thank-you to reviewers appeared in last month’s issue, but I would like to reiterate it here.) All of these people, plus the many authors of papers and other submissions, make this Journal what it is today: the best publication in its field.

How Do You Use JCE?

Both print and online media are largely a one-way communication. We send out lots of information, but there are nowhere near as many messages coming back. The dedicated people who make it possible to publish our monthly issues are often curious about how many readers actually make use of what we print or put online and how many students are affected positively by JCE’s content and features. Stop and think for a moment. Have you used a JCE Tested Demonstration in your teaching? Have you used a JCE laboratory experiment and the Project Chemlab index of laboratory experiments to enhance your laboratory program? Have you used a JCE Classroom Activity with your students or in an outreach program? Have you used JCE Software in your classes? Have you used Chemistry Comes Alive! videos to show your students chemistry that would otherwise not be available to them? Have you used the JCE Digital Library offerings (JCE WebWare, JCE SymMath, and others)? Have you used JCE effectively in some other way? We hope you have, we would like to know about it, and we are providing an opportunity for you to tell us. In the process you can tell many other people who will be interested.

Tell Your Colleagues

Next summer, at the 19th Biennial Conference on Chemical Education, JCE is organizing a symposium titled, “Using JCE Resources Effectively”. We invite high school teachers, college teachers, and anyone else who has used JCE materials to submit short papers describing how resources from the Journal of Chemical Education have been incorporated into classes and curricula. If you are interested in sharing your ideas and successes, large and small, with others, go to the Web site of the 19th BCCE, choose “Call for papers, etc.”, scroll down to the link, “Submit a paper or poster to the conference”, find the symposium “Using JCE Resources Effectively”, and follow the directions for submitting an abstract.

We would certainly like to hear from you via this symposium.

Tell Me!

Whether or not you can participate at the 19th BCCE, we would still like to know about your effective and innovative uses of JCE. If you cannot submit an abstract, please let us know by email about how you are using JCE resources effectively. Send your email to JCE with “Using JCE Resources” in the subject line. The editorial office will compile the information we have received as of the first of May, and I will summarize it for the symposium next summer as well as in this space. I expect that there will be many useful ideas from which symposium participants and JCE readers will be able to benefit. In addition, knowing that others value and use what we produce is a major incentive for staff and volunteers to continue to make this the best chemical education journal there is.

I look forward to hearing from you.