ChemSpider is a free, online chemical database offering access to physical and chemical properties, molecular structure, spectral data, synthetic methods, safety information, and nomenclature for almost 25 million unique chemical compounds sourced and linked to almost 400 separate data sources on the Web. ChemSpider is quickly becoming the primary chemistry Internet portal and it can be very useful for both chemical teaching and research.

Cell phones, especially "smartphones" (see note), are being widely used by students. It is misleading to call many of these devices phones, since they are actually a portable and powerful computer that can be valuable in the chemistry classroom. Currently, there are three major ways in which smartphones can be used for education. Smartphones include a web browser, which gives access to the wealth of material on the World Wide Web (WWW), inexpensive applications (commonly called apps) expand this usefulness even further, and two-dimensional barcode labels can be used to create "smart objects." Taken together, these capabilities are creating a world of mobile computing whose impact on society, including chemical education, may be even greater than the changes brought about by the personal computer.

Increasing numbers of college students own cell phones, and many of these phones are smartphones, which include features such as still and video cameras, global positioning systems, Internet access, and computers as powerful as the desktop models of only a few years ago. A number of chemical educators are already using these devices for education. By the time they reach college, many students have created video content and shared it on Web sites, such as YouTube. It has become easy to create two-dimensional barcodes that include a universal resource locator Web address that can connect the Web browser on a smartphone to a Web site. This article discusses how these new capabilities can be used to teach chemistry.

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Some have called the current generation of college students the Web generation. They are wrong! The pace of technology change continues to quicken. The effects of globalization and social networking have not yet had their full impact. At best, the present students represent a transitional group. The tools we use define us, and the media revolution is changing so fast that in a decade we will be dealing with college-age students as different from today's college students as current college students are different from their teachers. How can faculty prepare themselves to teach the current transitional generation and also begin to understand the true Web generation that will arrive on campus in another decade?