Technology in the Service of Pedagogy: Teaching with Chemistry Databases

The chemical sciences integrate numerous pieces of structural data into families of compounds, and countless experimental results of reactive processes into ground rules. Collecting these pieces of information, analyzing them, and making the relevant contextual connections between them is in the heart of chemistry education. Here we emphasize the contribution of technology, and more specifically, chemical databases for enhancing these learning processes. Several important, open access, databases are described in detail and examples of using them in chemistry class are provided. In an era of continuous information revolution we hope that chemistry instructors will take the next step up, and acquire the professional skills needed to integrate the use of technology and chemistry databases in their classes.