Andrew Lyman-Buttler

science educator / medical student

About me / Curriculum vitae
Original curriculum materials and writing samples
Moodle resources
Chemistry quiz bank for Moodle - free download

Projects:

Retrieval practice and effective assessment in secondary science: a blended approach (essay) (slides)
CompoundIt! - the chemistry formula word game

The Minneapolis school district, in the midst of perhaps the most disruptive event in public school history (COVID-19), has approved a plan that will compound the disruption in the name of furthering equity, with Arneson, Ali, Caprini, Ellison, Inz, and Pauly voting yes 6-3. Since bandying about the word "equity" is …

…

Ed Graff's shell game

Minneapolis Public Schools held their first public info session last night on Comprehensive District Design (CDD), which is being marketed as an ambitious school desegregation plan. The district claims that, by changing attendance zones, eliminating K-8 programming, and making a number of other fairly drastic changes, six "Racially Identifiable…

…

Is CDD snake oil?

Minneapolis Public Schools has recently announced its desire to drastically shake up where most students attend school and how they get there in a program they're calling Comprehensive District Design. (Full disclosure: I have a child in a district school, one that we selected in part because of its K-8…

…

use this Excel template to aggregate data from your classroom assessments

You've already incorporated best practices like interleaved practice, spaced rehearsal, and retrieval practice, but how do you know your teaching is working? How do you know your students have retained content you taught them a few months ago?

Your gradebook gives you a limited, myopic view of progress made by individual students. M…

…

Organic nomenclature with Moodle

We had some time left over this year after finishing the regular curriculum, so I added on a short organic nomenclature unit. Tim Hunt and the Open University team maintain an outstanding Moodle plugin that uses the JSME Molecular Editor to accept student line drawing input, convert it to a SMILES …

…

Write one set of questions and upload it to Kahoot and Moodle

I use Kahoot to review before tests and Moodle for quizzes, but sometimes I want the same question set for both. After spending way too much time typing the same questions twice, I made an Excel file based on the official Kahoot! upload template and wrote a second tab that…

…

How to run a titration lab without marking any papers

Running labs is without a doubt one of the best parts of teaching chemistry, but grading papers is among the worst. Here's how I outsourced that part of my job to a computer, saving hours of work per week and providing instant feedback on student work at the same time.

… …

Chemistry quiz/test bank

I've developed a bank of over 1,000 original chemistry assessment items for Moodle. Question types include multiple choice, click and drag, and calculated questions with randomly generated numbers in the prompt. (In fact, for nearly every question in which students must make a calculation, new random numbers are…

…

Using Moodle to Score Lab Calculations Instantly

A variant of this article appeared in the May 2018 edition of AACT Chemistry Solutions.

Introduction

With a little bit of advance preparation, you can program Moodle to correct students' lab calculations. This has a number of distinct advantages:

students receive immediate feedback
greatly reduced teacher workload
students…

…

Andrew Lyman-Buttler

Latest posts

Introduction