Slide on over to The Iowa General Chemistry Network athttp://www.public.iastate.edu/~iachemed/FIPSE/homepage.html to learn how chemistry instructors among Iowa's community colleges, private universities, and the three regents institutions are cooperating to improve the ways introductory chemistry is taught. FIPSE, the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary School Education of the Department of Education, helped fund this project.

We all know that the student is the key to the learning process, and we are beginning to understand that all students do not learn the same way. Go to the Learning Styles Inventories at http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/~ggay/lstests.htm for a group of sources about learning styles, including self-tests for your students.

And how many times do we hear that the reason a student persisted in chemistry was because of a special mentor in his or her academic career? Advisor, Teacher, Role Model, Friend: On Being a Mentor to Students in Science and Engineering (http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/mentor/ ) is a site that seeks to stimulate a renewed interest in bringing mentoring back into academic circles. Multi-authored by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine, this site has sections on the ethics of mentoring, mentoring for undergraduates, and an extensive bibliography on mentoring.

Learning exactly what chemical equations represent is hard for students, especially when several equations are involved. R. W. Missen and W. R. Smith have produced CRS: Chemical Reaction Stoichiometry at http://www.chemical-stoichiometry.net, which uses elementary matrix operations "to obtain a proper set of independent chemical equations to represent the conservation of atomic species in terms of the molecular formulas of the system species." Download the Tutorial at http://www.chemical-stoichiometry.net/tutorial.html and plan to spend some time reading and digesting the material. Then go to the Java Applet JSTOICH at http://www.chemical-stoichiometry.net/jstoich.html to get some practice with CRS. By the way, this site works best on a PC rather than a Mac. Try this site for it will open your eyes to many possibilities.

And speaking of possibilities, would you like to know about funding for higher education in your state? A great source of information is from NSF: SESTAT at http://srsstats.sbe.nsf.gov/. SESTAT is a comprehensive and integrated system of information about the employment, educational, and demographic characteristics of scientists and engineers in the United States. You can configure this site to please yourself, so that you get the information you want. Being able to get the information you want in the format you like is beginning to really use the power of the Web.

Carolyn Sweeney Judd teaches at Houston Community College System, 1300 Holman, Houston, TX 77004; phone: 713/718-6095; email: cjudd@tenet.edu.

World Wide Web Addresses

University of Hawaii or Advanced Technology Education:
http://www.ecet.mauicc.hawaii.edu/

WebCT or Try Out WebCT Now:
http://homebrew.cs.ubc.ca/webct/try/

Iowa General Chemistry Network:
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~iachemed/FIPSE/homepage.html

Learning Styles Inventories:
http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/~ggay/lstests.htm

On Being a Mentor:
http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/mentor/

Chemical Reaction Stoichiometry:
http://www.chemical-stoichiometry.net

Chemical Reaction Stoichiometry Tutorial:
http://www.chemical-stoichiometry.net/tutorial.html

Java Applet JSTOICH:
http://www.chemical-stoichiometry.net/jstoich.html

NSF's Scientist and Engineer Statistics Data System (SESTAT):
http://srsstats.sbe.nsf.gov/

Image:
http://srsstats.sbe.nsf.gov/images/icons/sestat.jpg

access date for all sites: June 1998