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.
At the end of my inorganic course, I teach several "cool" analytical 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. I provide this website to the students as supplemental reading material for X-ray crystallography, which is not typically covered in depth in an introductory inorganic text. The first link is the main website, but I usually only focus on the 2nd and 3rd links which covering the experimental setup for an X-ra
This is how I always end my organometallics unit in my advanced inorganic chemistry class. The students have already learned electron counting, the major reaction types (oxidative addition (OA), reductive elimination (RE), 1,1- and 1,2-insertion, β-hydrogen elimination, and [2+2] cycloadditions), and have gone through naming elementary steps in class for some classic catalytic cycles (hydrogenation with Wilkinson's catalyst and the Monsanto acetic acid process).
The Interdisciplinary Education Group at the University of Wisconsin Madison Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) has a fabulous website with a wide variety of great resources for teaching about materials and the nanoworld at all levels. A favorite "corner" of this website that I refer to a lot in my own teaching is the library of so-called Resource Slides on a variety of topics. These Resource Slides are divided up into 36 topical Slide Shows and include wonderful graphics to use in class presentations. Slide Shows include:
This is a resource that focuses on the elements from a geological perspective. What I like about the website is that it provides examples of the uses and sources of elements.
In this open-ended activity, students design crystallizations to can see who can grow the biggest crystals of their colorful products. This addition is something that I add to the standard M(acac)3 syntheses that many of us do as an introductory lab in an upper level course or as a final lab in an introductory type course. Syntheses of the M(acac)3 starting materials are available in most published inorganic laboratory manuals.
The resources contained within this web site are designed to help students learn concepts of molecular symmetry and to help faculty teach concepts of molecular symmetry.
This spreadsheet allows students to build complexes of a variety of geometries and to then use the angular overlap model to explore d-orbital energies when interacting with ligands whose esigma and epi energies can be varied.
http://academics.wellesley.edu/Chemistry/Flick/Excel/angoverlap.xls