For any Chemistry teachers or students studying Chemistry, this new experimental software is absolutely fantastic. It may seem really simple but the Chemistry add in for Word could be one of the most effective tools around at the moment to help students learn chemistry and save teachers much time in preparing resources.
Please forward this to any Science teachers you know, it is really easy to install and even better is free! Get them to visit: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/chem4word/ They can then download the add in for word, there are also additional user documents to download which explain how you can use it, there is even a demo video which explains it really well.
So what is it? I hear you cry, well basically once downloaded you open a word document and a chemistry tab at the top appears on the tool bar. Then you can do various cool things for example if you were a teacher creating some notes for students or a work sheet, you type in the word methane, you want to then write the chemical symbols and draw the 2d molecular structure for it which takes a lot of time, however now you have the chemistry add in you click on chemistry and it automatically then adds the symbols and molecular structure for you – wow! I really think this has loads of potential, especially as you can also import more chemicals, compounds etc than the stock lot you start with. There are all sorts of things you could do such as students creating their own interactive worksheets, it could be used to support less able students or even extend gifted and talented students who can import more advanced compounds or even draw their own molecular structures and import them into the library.
I would be really interested to hear if you use this in any way or if you have any ideas on how it can be used. What do you think of this as a learning tool?