As the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic in March 2020, universities around the world reacted quickly by shifting classes online. To varying extents, this rapid change required chemistry teacher educators to rethink and redesign their units and delivery. Some teacher educators may have perceived this shift as a timely opportunity to reflect on their technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) and on how to model TPACK through chemistry preservice teacher education classes. This paper presents reflections from three chemistry teacher educators from different universities in Victoria, Australia. The reflections are offered in the form of vignettes that illustrate how these teacher educators modeled the use of digital technologies to meaningfully support preservice teachers’ learning in chemistry education. After the teachers independently wrote the vignettes, they were analyzed for common themes which have been used to develop recommendations for other chemistry teacher educators who may also find themselves reflecting on their TPACK as they support preservice teachers in an online environment.

The collaboration between Museum Victoria and ReMSTEP partners: the University of Melbourne and Deakin University has enabled the development of the Reconceptualising Rocks project, designed to enhance the teaching of Earth Science for pre-service Science teachers. This study sought to determine how perceptions and understandings of Earth Science can be enhanced through immersion in the contextual learning in the Museum. Furthermore, the project aimed to explore how science ideas and practices can be translated for educational purposes. The findings revealed that participants found Earth Science interesting and were able to identify links to other Science areas. These findings have implications for the teaching of Earth Science across the curriculum.

This article describes a series of more than 20 new compounds formed by the combination of 2,4,6-trihydroxybenzoic acid (H4thba) with metal ions in the presence of a base, with structures that include discrete molecular units, chains, and two- and three-dimensional networks. As a result of the presence of two ortho-hydroxy groups, H4thba is a relatively strong acid (pK a1 = 1.68). The carboxylate group in H3thba− is therefore considerably less basic than most carboxylates with intramolecular hydrogen bonds, conferring a rigid planar geometry upon the anion. These characteristics of H3thba− significantly impact upon the way it interacts with metal ions. In s-block metal compounds, where the interaction of the metal centres with the carboxylate O atoms is essentially ionic, the anion bonds to up to three metal centres via a variety of binding modes. In cases where the metal ion is able to form directional coordinate bonds, however, the carboxylate group tends to bond in a monodentate mode, interacting with just one metal centre in the syn mode. A dominant influence on the structures of the complexes seems to be the face-to-face stacking of the aromatic rings, which creates networks containing layers of metal–oxygen polyhedra that participate in hydrogen bonding. This investigation was undertaken, in part, by a group of secondary school students as an educational exercise designed to introduce school students to the technique of single-crystal X-ray diffraction and enhance their understanding of primary and secondary bonding.