Over the years I have developed a number of interactive tools that I use in my classes. This is a tool that seems appropriate for VIPEr. Comments are always appreciated, and I am always interested in developing new tools if there is something you might find useful.
This tool allows you to look at how molecular orbitals change as the difference in electronegativities of the parent atomic orbitals increases.
The Interactive Inorganic Challenge Forum is a resource for inorganic chemistry teachers who want to incorporate team learning questions (“Challenges”) into an upper level undergraduate inorganic course. Through this site, teachers can exchange their ideas with others who have used inorganic chemistry Challenges. As a result, students benefit from field-tested group questions.
This in-class exercise prepares students for the homework Literature Searching: Bibliography Assignment. It allows them to practice the skills needed for that assignment while in class.
To allow students to become familiar with the structure of chemical literature and provide them with an understanding of several types of basic handbooks.
This web site contains a number of interactive spreadsheets, most of which are applicable to inorganic chemistry (or a physical chemistry class that uses inorganic examples). Here's the list of the most relevant for most inorganic classes:
ABC kinetics - interactively plot concentration versus reaction extent for A, B and C in A -> B -> C by varying k values
This activity uses Gaussian with the WebMO interface to investigate the role of the metal in backbonding to CO as well as effects of the trans ligands. It can also be used as a way of introducing computational chemistry in an inorganic course.
This worksheet gives students practice with deriving and analyzing the rate laws for two step mechanisms. It's a good review of steady-state kinetics, the assumptions one makes in deriving rate laws, and rate determining steps (and how these last affect the rate law). It finishes by connecting these ligand substitution kinetics to Michaelis-Menton kinetics to show that "it's all the same math, we just change the form".
This assignment will orient new students to searching and finding chemical literature and effectively citing said literature. The library session focuses on the semantics of the ACS style, overviews appropriate indexing/searching tools, and has students search and find two citations for a future lab assignment for their chemistry class.
Delicious is a social bookmarking tool that retains bookmarks on the web. Users can access their bookmarks from any computer, and Delicious allows for the tagging of bookmarks with relevant descriptors for follow up, searching, and collaborative work.