Lee Amosslee's Science Teaching Tools

General

Tips for using TI graphing calculators
No naked numbers, a PDF file (red circle with slash) with "naked numbers" slashed out. A poster to remind students to use units with their numbers. (Two pages, slightly different layout.) Thanks to Jeff from the NSTA chemistry email list for the idea.

Chemistry

Periodic table spreadsheet (written in QuattroPro, also available in Excel 5/7). Right click to save the spreadsheet to your disk (click and hold on a Mac).

This spreadsheet has the periodic table on the second sheet, with each mass named with the symbol of the elements. Thus, typing in =h*2+o will give you the mass of water.
The sheet also contains several constants, including gas, Planck's, mass of e^-, p⁺, n^o, and charge of e^-.
The first sheet is named "Work Area." Use this sheet to do your work. The second sheet, "Periodic Table," contains all the values for the molar masses. This sheet is locked so you can't accidentally type over a value. There is no password on the lock, so if you need to add another constant, you can simply unlock the sheet, add your constant, then re-lock it.

Classroom resources

WhiteboardsUSA.com is a great source of pre-cut and finished white boards for classroom use. They are available in multiple dimensions, and are great groups creating presentations for the class. The site also has a pleathora of tips on wise use of whiteboards in the classroom. If you have the skills to cut your own Melamine from your local hardware store, it will be cheaper, but once you factor in your time, these boards are a deal!

Used lab equipment

Here's a few auction houses that specialize in scientific lab equipment. You probably won't find class sets of large equipment, but maybe of small equipment, or a few of specialized equipment.

American Equipment Exchange
American Lab Equipment
labX Scientific Marketplace
TeacherResourceExchange.ORG: Teacher to teacher textbook and materials exchange.

A tip on finding others: Search for the item you want in Google&tm; or another search engine, and other auction/used sellers may show up.

And there's always eBay.

Where ever you buy used, remember: Let the buyer beware. I would especially say this about eBay, since the others are targeted toward lab equipment buyers, and as such may be a bit more discriminating. I've bought quite a bit on eBay, just avoid the deals that look to good to be true (they probably are).

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Other resources

Lee (Amosslee) Trampleasure's Science Education Pages
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