In this lab experiment, students use sol-gel chemistry to prepare silica gel monoliths from tetraethylorthosilicate (TEOS). Carrying out the hydrolysis and condensation under acid-catalyzed vs.
This is an interactive small-group discussion activity I did on the first day of sophomore-level inorganic chemistry to get students to interact with each other and brainstorm to collectively review what they knew about atomic orbitals. I also wanted to "set the stage" for non-lecture type activities in this class. I adapted this in-class activity from one posted by Joanne Stewart (Hope College) with additional questions from a fundamental quiz posted by Barbara Reisner
Theo Gray has compiled some of his Popular Science columns into a beautiful book of sometimes dangerous experiments, many of them with particular relevance to inorganic chemistry! With chapter names like "Experimental Cuisine", "Doomsday DIY", and "Twisted Shop Class", you know you in for a wild ride. Some particularly intriguing experiments include electroplating a copper design on your iPod, making glass and elemental silicon out of sand, making a burning Mg/dry ice sculpture, anodizing Ti for cool color effects, and creating a "hill billy hot tub" using 600 lbs of quicklime.
http://firstyear.chem.usyd.edu.au/calculators/mo_diagrams.shtml
Flash based tools to help with the construction of MO diagrams:
While this site is also a commercial site (selling Theo's periodic tables and book, etc.) it is a wonderful resource of pictures of elements and their compounds, and "real life" uses of elements (such as a gamma ray imaging of the skeleton for Tc, a hard drive for B, and sushi for Hg!). It is also a source of movies of reactions of the elements, including some pretty impressive ones for the alkali metals and the thermite reaction. It also provides easy access to his chemistry column for Popular Science magazine.
This website provides access to many formulations of the periodic table over time. I think that looking at the various representations of the table would provide an excellent way to discuss periodic trends.
This list was compiled by Mark R. Leach and is part of his free resource, The Chemogenesis web book.
The University of Oklahoma has put together a nice website on Crystallography which includes a standard introduction to crystallography & crystal symmetry. I also like some of the features that you don't normally come across including evaluating crystal structures and twinning.
At the end of my inorganic course, I teach several "cool" spectroscopic techniques that inorganic chemists use. These techniques are discussed within the context of bioinorganic chemistry, and I typically cover EXAFS/XANES, X-ray crystallography, EPR and Mössbauer.
This website introduces (or reviews) Fourier Transforms in a neat graphical way, but most importantly, illustrates the phase problem. Given the intensities from your crystal and the phases from your model, the phases are more important! Which is too bad, as we don't have ready access to that information.
When teaching reactions and mechanisms of inorganic complexes, I tend to get to the end of the chapter (out of breath) and find myself thinking "*$#&, I forgot about electron transfer". While I think it is important that students get an understanding of this in an upper level inorganic course, I simply don't have, or forgot to budget the time to really talk about it.